Job Role: Senior PHP Developer
Reference: BH-353p
Job Type: Permanent
Location: Fully Remote, UK residents only
Salary: up to £60,000 per annum
About The Client:
Our client is a cybersecurity company that helps organisations protect sensitive information. Their platform uses large-scale data collection, cross-referencing, and real-time alerting to provide actionable intelligence. With a strong focus on automation and scalability, they support clients ranging from enterprises to government agencies.
Overview:
We’re looking for a talented and experienced Senior PHP Developer to join a small, highly technical and fast-moving team working on cutting-edge data analysis tools. You’ll be the fifth member of a growing engineering group, building and maintaining mission-critical backend systems that help cross-reference and validate sensitive client data against publicly known data leaks and records.
This is a hands-on development role focused on designing, building, and improving scalable microservice-driven APIs. You’ll initially lead key development on Laravel-based APIs, with opportunities to broaden your scope across Python, Java, and other backend services as the platform evolves.
Key Responsibilities:
* Designing and developing robust RESTful APIs using Laravel (v10) and PHP best practices.
* Collaborating with a small team to scale a microservices architecture that powers internal tools and public APIs.
* Implementing secure authentication flows using OAuth2, SSO, and Laravel Sanctum.
* Working on data scraping, ingestion, and processing pipelines pulling from sources such as social media and public data leaks.
* Supporting data processing and analysis at scale – think Elasticsearch, Apache Spark (or equivalents), and PHP generators.
* Writing clean, testable code using PHPUnit, service containers, and SOLID principles.
* Participating in DevOps and deployment workflows via Docker, GitLab CI/CD, and AWS ECS/ECR, with infrastructure as code via Terraform.
* Interacting with modern observability tools – Sentry, Grafana, AWS Logs – to support reliability and performance.
* Supporting longer-term plans for integration with LLMs for data summarisation and intelligence tasks.
* Collaborating across teams, contributing to architectural decisions, and mentoring junior developers as the team scales.
Tech Stack and Tools:
* PHP (Laravel v10)
* Swagger / OpenAPI
* OAuth2, Laravel Sanctum
* Kafka, Redis
* AWS (ECS, ECR, RDS, CloudWatch)
* Terraform
* GitLab CI/CD Pipelines
* Docker
* SPA Frontend (React, Next.js, TailwindCSS)
* Elasticsearch, Apache Spark
* Sentry, Grafana, AWS Logs
* Python, Java, Golang
Requirements/experience:
* 5+ years of experience in backend PHP development, ideally with Laravel.
* Strong understanding of modern API development, design patterns, and secure coding practices.
* Hands-on experience with containerised environments (Docker), cloud platforms (AWS), and CI/CD tools.
* Experience working with large-scale data processing, scraping, or cross-referencing systems.
* Familiarity with Kafka, Redis, and distributed system patterns.
* Experience in building systems that prioritise security, performance, and scalability.
* Unit and functional testing mindset; comfortable with PHPUnit and test-driven development.
* Proactive, collaborative, and comfortable working in startup-like environments with a high degree of ownership.
Additional/Desirable experience:
* Exposure to Python, Java, or Golang, and interest in working across multiple languages.
* Interest in or experience with cybersecurity, data protection, or threat intelligence domain