Senior PHP Backend Engineer- Perm - High-Performance FinTech

Senior PHP Backend Engineer- High-Performance FinTech

Location: Full Remote

Employment: Permanent

Salary: £120,000

About the company:

Join a lean, venture-backed product team building automation software that eliminates manual Back Office workflows in complex, traditional industries. The platform is scaling fast, and we're looking for a Senior PHP Engineer to take ownership of core Back End services and performance-critical systems. You'll work closely with product and leadership, shaping the roadmap and shipping features that reach thousands of business users.

What you'll do

• Architect, build, and evolve robust Back End services and APIs in PHP with a strong focus on performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Drive profiling and tuning for high-concurrency/low-latency environments; lead efforts on caching, queues, and database optimisation.
• Implement best practices in security (including payment flows) and compliance (eg, PCI-DSS), championing code quality across the codebase.
• Own API architecture & integrations, including resilient error handling, idempotency, and graceful retries; support two-way sync with external systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally on the product roadmap; contribute to engineering standards, testing discipline, and code reviews.

Tech environment:

• PHP (modern) with async/event-loop concepts (eg, ReactPHP/FrameworkX), custom libraries, and clean, testable design.
• APIs: RESTful services, two-way integrations, robust error handling & retry/backoff.
• Performance: high concurrency, low latency, Redis caching, queues/delayed processing, microservices.
• Data: MySQL with indexing and query optimisation; profiling for throughput. (
• Security & payments: network security, payment gateways (eg, Stripe/PayPal/bank APIs), understanding of PCI-DSS.
• Quality: unit/integration testing, reviews, and design patterns to ensure maintainable code.

What we're looking for

• A strong track record delivering complex, production-grade PHP backends.
• Comfort operating at a senior level, owning major technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Evidence of high-concurrency/scalability work and systematic performance optimisation.
• Hands-on with Redis, queues (eg, delayed jobs, Kafka/RabbitMQ-style systems), and microservices.
• API craftsmanship: REST standards, two-way sync, idempotency, error/compensation strategies.
• Security & payments: experience integrating payment rails and working with PCI-DSS or similar.
• Bonus points for open-source contributions or work on complex financial/latency-sensitive systems.

If you're excited by complex problems, high-performance engineering, and real product impact, we'd love to hear from you

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Impellam Group Portfolio are acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.