Senior PHP Software Engineer

Senior PHP Software Engineer

Zendesk

Krakow, Poland

In this role you’ll design and deliver scalable backend systems that power features used by thousands of customers and millions of end users, helping organizations optimize workforce efficiency through reliable, data-driven automation.

What you’ll be doing

• Design, implement, test, and maintain PHP backend services (Laravel or similar) that power large-scale, customer-facing features.
• Own end-to-end delivery for features and components: participate in discovery, estimate and plan work, implement, test, deploy, and support in production.
• Influence system architecture, API design, and data models to balance reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Collaborate closely with Product, SRE, QA, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate requirements into pragmatic technical solutions.
• Improve system observability, instrumentation, and operational runbooks; participate in on-call rotations and incident postmortems.
• Drive reduction of technical debt through targeted refactors, platform improvements, and reusable abstractions.
• Mentor and coach colleagues, provide thoughtful code reviews, and contribute to team-level best practices and documentation.

What you bring to the role

• 5+ years professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years building and operating PHP backend systems in production.
• Strong experience with a modern PHP framework (Laravel preferred) and test frameworks such as PHPUnit/Codeception.
• Solid skills designing and implementing RESTful APIs, background job processing, and message-driven workflows.
• Practical experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL): schema design, indexing, query tuning, and migrations.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Good understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (timeouts/retries, idempotency, eventual consistency) and scalable design patterns.
• Clear communicator who collaborates effectively across disciplines and helps grow technical capability through mentorship.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Swoole, Laravel Octane, or other PHP performance optimization platforms.
• Exposure to event-driven systems and messaging platforms (Kafka or similar) and analytical stores such as ClickHouse.
• Familiarity with observability and incident tooling (Datadog, Sentry) and defining/using SLOs/SLIs.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, or advanced CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Spinnaker).
• Prior experience building shared libraries or platform components consumed across multiple teams.