PHP Software Engineer II

PHP Software Engineer II

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

• Write, test, review, and maintain high-quality PHP code and services used by millions worldwide.
• Deliver end-to-end work across the SDLC: design, implement, test, deploy, and operate features and services.
• Lead squad-level initiatives and collaborate with product, ops, and customer-facing teams to translate requirements into robust solutions.
• Drive technical decision-making for your area: design APIs, event schemas, and data models; identify tradeoffs and recommend solutions.
• Tackle technical debt and refactor complex components; break large problems into manageable deliverables.
• Monitor, profile, and optimize system performance, scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Mentor and provide actionable feedback through code reviews; participate in hiring to grow the team.
• Contribute to documentation, runbooks, and on-call practices to improve operational reliability.

What you bring to the role

• 3+ years of professional experience building production services in PHP (Laravel or similar frameworks).
• Good practical experience with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and deploying services on cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
• Knowledge of relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and writing performant queries; experience with unit and integration testing (PHPUnit, Codeception).
• Familiarity with RESTful APIs and event-driven architectures; comfortable designing for eventual consistency, retries, and failure modes.
• Experience with observability and performance tools; comfortable interpreting metrics and logs to drive improvements.
• Clear and empathetic communicator who can partner across engineering, product, and support teams.
• Growth mindset: you enjoy learning new technologies and implementing them.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience building event-driven systems and/or using Kafka in production.
• Experience with ClickHouse, Swoole, or Laravel Octane is a plus.
• Prior experience working in agile squads and contributing to technical strategy and architecture.
• Background in performance tuning and capacity planning for high-throughput services.