Technical Lead - PHP Development

Technical Lead - PHP Development

Bitdefender

Bucharest, Romania

About the role

We're looking for a hands-on Technical Lead – PHP Development to guide a small team of engineers building applications supporting various aspects of our business. This is a player-coach role: you'll spend a meaningful share of your time in the code, and the rest raising the bar for how the team designs, ships, supports and grows. You'll be in code reviews, pairing on tricky problems, shaping architecture, and helping developers do the best work - while keeping delivery steady and technical debt in check.

What you'll do

• Lead by doing - write and review production PHP code, and set the standard for quality through your own work
• Collaborates with the QA team in the investigation process of reported issues
• Work in close collaboration with the Product Owner and System Manager on the planning and estimation of the various projects the team is working on
• Get involved in support activities for the business team/users of the platforms, troubleshooting and finding solutions for production issues
• Own the technical direction of the team's services: architecture decisions, API design, and data modeling to ensure other functionalities are not affected by the new developments
• Guide a codebase that spans modern Symfony alongside legacy CakePHP systems, driving pragmatic modernization without stalling delivery
• Run effective code reviews and mentor engineers of varying experience levels. In the Pull Request review process makes sure that each development meets „clean code” principles and best development principles are applied
• Plan and estimate work, break down features, and keep the team unblocked and focused
• Balance shipping speed against long-term maintainability, and make that trade-off explicit
• Champion engineering practices: automated testing, CI/CD, static analysis, and clean, reviewable code, documentation
• Explore, learn and apply AI where it's feasible and adds real value - from AI-assisted development to smarter support, logging, and automation - and help the team adopt it responsibly
• Own the support side of the team: make application health a habit, continuously improve logging and observability, turn recurring support pain into engineering work

What we're looking for

Must-haves

• 5+ years of professional PHP development, including actual experience in a leading role
• Strong, current PHP expertise, solid OOP, and deep hands-on experience with Symfony (Doctrine, DI, the wider ecosystem)
• Comfort working in and gradually improving legacy code (CakePHP or similar)
• Solid relational database skills (PostgreSQL): schema design, query optimization, indexing, avoiding N+1 traps
• Experience designing and consuming REST APIs
• A track record of writing tested, maintainable code - PHPUnit, static analysis, CI/CD
• Proven experience leading or mentoring developers, running code reviews, and estimating/planning work
• Openness to learning and applying AI
• Strong debugging and log-analysis skills, and a service mindset
• Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously
• Clear communication in English

Nice-to-haves

• Caching and queues (Redis, message brokers)
• Containerization and cloud (Docker, CI pipelines, AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Experience modernizing or migrating legacy monoliths toward service-oriented architectures
• Familiarity with front-end or full-stack context enough to collaborate well