34 - Senior PHP Engineer
Company: Tunga
Role summary
34 - Senior PHP Engineer is a full-time role at Tunga (remote). Posted 2026-08-17. Experience level: 5-10.
- Job title
- 34 - Senior PHP Engineer
- Company
- Tunga
- Location
- Remote
- Work arrangement
- remote
- Employment type
- full-time
- Category
- Software Engineering
- Experience level
- 5-10
- Date posted
- 2026-08-17
Job description
We're looking for a PHP engineer to join a backend team and own services end-to-end — architecture, integrations, testing, and what happens to them once they're live.
You'll be handed a problem area rather than a fully specified spec, and the expectation is that you work out how the service should be shaped, build it, and then own it in production. The setup is distributed and fast-moving: decisions get made in writing, work gets picked up across time zones, and nobody is standing over you.
What you'll be doing
Designing, building and owning PHP services end-to-end — primarily in Laravel
Making architecture decisions on service boundaries, domain models and how services talk to each other
Building and maintaining REST APIs and backend integrations with third-party systems
Modelling business logic with Domain-Driven Design rather than pushing it into controllers
Working with event-driven patterns — message flows, event sourcing where it earns its place
Writing tests that let the team change the code later with confidence
Working with MySQL/Postgres: schema design, queries, and the performance problems that show up at scale
Deploying and operating your services through Docker and CI/CD on cloud infrastructure
Debugging and improving what's already running, not only shipping new features
Required skills and experience
5+ years of professional PHP experience — production systems, not course or side projects
Laravel — strong, hands-on. This is the primary framework of the role.
Domain-Driven Design — you can model a domain and explain the boundaries you drew
Microservices and event-driven design — you've built and operated them, including the failure modes
Event sourcing — practical experience, and judgement about when it's the wrong tool
REST API design and backend integrations with external systems
MySQL and/or PostgreSQL — schema design and query optimisation
One major cloud platform (AWS, GCP or Azure), plus Docker and CI/CD pipelines
Automated testing as a normal part of how you work
Professional English, written and spoken — clear, and clear in writing especially
Comfortable owning a topic independently in a fully remote team, and reliable about responding when someone is blocked on you
Nice to have
Symfony, Lumen, CodeIgniter or CakePHP
Message brokers or queues (RabbitMQ, SQS, Kafka)
Infrastructure as code, or monitoring and observability tooling
Performance work on high-traffic PHP systems
Experience in a distributed team spanning several time zones
Who you are
Autonomous — you take a topic and run with it without needing close supervision
Pragmatic — you pick the architecture the problem justifies, not the most interesting one
A reliable, timely communicator — you close the loop, and you flag problems early rather than at the deadline