Senior Backend Developer (PHP)

Location: Flexible setup with office, remote, or hybrid work options.

Salary: Competitive salary, reviewed every 6 months based on market trends and performance.

Company

hirify.global develops and operates a successful city-builder game with a live mobile version and a high-load production backend.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain PHP backend services supporting a production system with approximately 100k daily active users.
• Extend and evolve a monolithic backend architecture while improving stability and scalability.
• Design and maintain APIs, JSON Schema-based API contracts, and internal jRPC communication.
• Optimize MongoDB and Redis storage, caching strategies, background processes, and heavy backend flows.
• Analyze performance and identify bottlenecks using Grafana and other monitoring tools.
• Ensure reliability under production load and support real-time and live-game functionality.

Requirements

• 5+ years of strong commercial PHP backend development experience.
• Experience in GameDev or other high-load backend systems.
• Solid understanding of OOP, software design principles, and monolithic architectures.
• Hands-on experience with MongoDB, Redis, AWS, Grafana, API contracts, and JSON Schema.
• Experience with jRPC or similar RPC/API approaches.
• Strong understanding of caching, concurrency and race conditions, fault tolerance, scalability, and bottleneck identification.

Nice to have

• Experience with real-time systems such as Centrifugo.
• Experience supporting live game servers, live-ops, and event-driven logic.
• Experience profiling and optimizing PHP applications.
• Understanding of CI/CD, observability, production workflows, and evolutionary development of legacy systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Stable international work environment with an experienced team willing to share knowledge.
• Annual $1,000 flexible benefits budget for health insurance, sports, therapy, education, and language classes.
• Full pay during sick and personal leave.
• 20 working days of vacation annually.
• Open statistics, including earnings from the games.