Senior PHP Developer (United Kingdom)

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