Senior II Backend Engineer (PHP)

Location: San Mateo, California, US; hybrid schedule with office attendance three days per week, Tuesday through Thursday. Candidates must be eligible to work in the United States.

Salary: $176,000–$220,000 base pay per year, plus annual bonus and equity.

Company

Slickdeals operates a large consumer shopping community that helps users discover and share deals through web and mobile platforms.

What you will do

• Lead the design and delivery of complex APIs and backend services supporting iOS and Android applications.
• Own backend initiatives from discovery and technical planning through implementation, rollout, and production support.
• Define API contracts, dependencies, release strategies, and backward-compatibility requirements with mobile engineers.
• Influence reusable backend architecture patterns and lead technical design and code reviews.
• Improve reliability, scalability, performance, security, observability, testing, and deployment practices.
• Diagnose production issues, reduce technical debt, modernize legacy systems, and mentor engineers across teams.

Requirements

• Extensive backend development experience with PHP and a modern PHP framework.
• Experience designing and operating high-traffic RESTful or GraphQL APIs, including authentication, authorization, caching, pagination, versioning, and error handling.
• Strong experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL performance optimization, distributed systems, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with JWT or similar token-based security, mobile push notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging and APNs, and comprehensive API testing strategies.
• Experience with cloud platforms, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, monitoring, logging, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
• Experience supporting large-scale consumer mobile applications and leading cross-team projects without formal authority.

Nice to have

• Experience with Vue, TypeScript, and modern frontend frameworks.
• Experience modernizing legacy services, decomposing monoliths, and influencing engineering practices across teams.
• Understanding of mobile constraints such as unreliable networks, latency, app-version fragmentation, backward compatibility, and phased releases.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work with regular collaboration from the San Mateo office.
• Competitive paid time off and holiday time off.
• Healthcare insurance plan options.
• 401(k) matching, annual bonus, and equity package.
• Professional Development Reimbursement Program.