Tech Lead (PHP)

Scale Army

Role Overview

The Senior Engineer / Tech Lead PHP (Laravel) will be a hands-on technical leader responsible for owning complex data models and overall system architecture. This role plays a central part in designing and evolving the domain model that supports user registrations, e-commerce transactions, subscriptions, and third-party integrations, while actively mentoring and guiding other engineers.

Key Responsibilities

Data Modeling & Architecture

• Design tables, relationships, and constraints for new domains and evolve existing schemas without breaking critical workflows

• Ensure data models are well-documented, consistent, and aligned with business goals

• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance speed, safety, scalability, and long-term maintainability

End-to-End Feature Delivery

• Own feature delivery from backend to frontend, ensuring seamless functionality across the stack

• Manage complex workflows including user registrations, subscription renewals, e-commerce transactions, and payment integrations

• Maintain operational resilience of background jobs supporting mission-critical tasks

Mentorship & Technical Leadership

• Mentor mid-level engineers and guide junior developers to build technical excellence across the team

• Lead code reviews with a focus on data modeling, architecture, and clean code standards

• Set patterns and standards for modules, services, and models aligned with business goals

Collaboration & Communication

• Work directly with product teams and founders to translate business requirements into clear technical designs

• Break work into coherent projects to maintain alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Communicate trade-offs clearly and propose improvements to enhance overall system quality

Production Readiness

• Design safe, reversible database migrations

• Ensure scalability and reliability of production systems

• Take ownership of background jobs, queue usage, and observability using monitoring tools such as Grafana

Qualifications

Experience

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend development using PHP and Laravel

• Experience building large, complex Laravel applications from initial development through deployment

• Hands-on experience with data modeling, system architecture, and evolving schemas for performance and scalability

• Experience building and maintaining e-commerce systems, including orders, subscriptions, payments, and third-party integrations

• Experience with PHP packages, background jobs, queue systems, and event-driven architectures

Skills

• Strong expertise in data modeling and architectural decision-making

• Full-stack capability with experience using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

• Ability to lead technical decisions while remaining highly hands-on in code

• Proven mentorship and leadership skills

• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams

What Success Looks Like

• Scalable and maintainable data models supporting high-volume transactions

• Reliable delivery of backend and frontend features at scale

• Strong technical mentorship resulting in a high-performing engineering team

• Clear alignment between business needs and long-term system architecture

Opportunity

This role offers the opportunity to take ownership of core system architecture and domain modeling in a growing, complex platform. The Senior Engineer / Tech Lead will have direct impact on technical direction, system scalability, and engineering standards, while working closely with product leaders and mentoring developers as the platform evolves.