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Senior PHP / Laravel Engineer
Boca Raton, FL 33432
1 month ago
🚀 Startup💻 Open SourceUses agentic AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) as multipliers but enforces strict engineering judgment—explicitly not vibe coding.
About the Role
Senior PHP/Laravel engineer to help architect, rebuild, and operate Lendzi’s lending platform end-to-end, owning production Laravel and WordPress applications, integrations with lenders, and leading an AWS migration while using AI-assisted development responsibly.
Job Description
Role
Senior backend engineer (founding-engineer level) reporting to the Director of Technology. Own and modernize Lendzi’s lending platform, operate production systems handling lending decisions for thousands of businesses per month, and help design and build a consolidated, modern Laravel platform with AI-enabled features.
Key Responsibilities
- Own production Laravel applications; maintain, improve, and refactor WordPress and Laravel codebases.
- Triage and resolve production issues, ship features, and harden security and reliability.
- Build and maintain integrations with external lenders and partners’ APIs; design observable, repeatable abstractions.
- Lead AWS migration and assist with DevOps and cloud infrastructure setup and management.
- Architect the platform rebuild (merchant, partner, lender, and admin portals) with AI at the center.
- Use agentic AI coding tools as a force multiplier while rigorously validating and reviewing all AI-generated output.
- Establish engineering standards: code review, testing, security, deployments, documentation, and runbooks.
Requirements
Required
- 7+ years professional backend engineering experience with strong recent Laravel and modern PHP production experience (Laravel 10 or 11, PHP 8.2+).
- Deep MySQL skills: schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations, data integrity.
- Production AWS experience: ECS or EC2, RDS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, IAM, S3, SQS.
- Strong API design and integration experience: REST, OAuth 2.0, webhooks, retries, idempotency, rate limiting.
- Security-conscious development: PII handling, encryption at rest/in transit, OWASP Top 10, secrets management; comfortable in a SOC 2 environment.
- Real-world use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) with disciplined validation of outputs.
- Strong written communication, self-direction, and ownership of production systems.
Preferred
- Fintech, lending, payments, or banking experience.
- Experience with Plaid, DocuSign, Zoho CRM, or comparable enterprise SaaS APIs.
- OpenAI or Anthropic API experience in production, including prompt engineering and structured output validation.
- Experience modernizing legacy PHP/Laravel applications (major-version upgrades).
- CI/CD pipeline experience (GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, or equivalent).
- Filament, Livewire, Sanctum, or Jetstream production experience.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary and performance-based annual bonus.
- Health, dental, vision, life insurance, employee assistance program, and flexible spending account.
- 401(k) and 401(k) matching; retirement plan.
- Paid time off.
- Founding-engineer seat, direct partnership with leadership, modern stack, and autonomy.
Location & Work Arrangement
- Hybrid schedule: Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Boca Raton, FL office; Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays remote.
Reporting & Hiring Process
- Reports to the Director of Technology. Candidates may be asked to complete a Laravel technical assessment followed by interviews.
Notes on AI Use
- The organization is AI-first and uses agentic tools broadly, but requires strict engineering judgment: every line of production code must be read, validated, and defensible by a senior engineer.