PHP Engineer

Job Description

12-Month Contract with potential for extension | Hybrid from Sydney office

Done building the same CRUD apps over and over?

This product engineering team responsible for a large-scale platform that sits at the centre of a $100B+ Australian market. It's the kind of system that quietly powers the businesses that manage millions of homes and billions in funds.

The codebase is substantial (750,000+ lines), but don't let that scare you. They're not looking for someone to come in and rewrite everything. They're looking for engineers who enjoy understanding complex systems and want to solve the kinds of problems that only exist at scale.

Why join?

• Actually interesting engineering problems -you'll spend your time improving performance, reliability and maintainability across a mature platform, rather than endlessly building forms and feature pages.
• Software engineers first, PHP engineers second - PHP is important and recent commercial experience is essential, but the team values strong engineering fundamentals over framework expertise.
• Modern engineering culture - the team is actively embracing AI-assisted development. Whether you're using Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor or similar, we’re looking for engineers who see these tools as essential part of their workflow.
• Senior team, collaborative environment - you'll work alongside experienced engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems together. Plenty of opportunity to contribute ideas, challenge decisions and have real ownership over the direction of the platform.

Tech

• PHP 8.3
• MySQL 8
• AWS
• KnockoutJS (some exposure, but not a major focus)

About you

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals
• Recent commercial PHP experience is a must
• Experience building and maintaining large production systems
• Comfortable working across cloud environments and modern development practices
• You actively use AI in your development workflow and are comfortable reviewing, refining and validating AI-generated code
• Collaborative, pragmatic and motivated by solving interesting engineering problems

Sound like you? Apply now!