Application Support Engineer (PHP/Laravel)

We are seeking an experienced L3 Application Support Engineer with strong PHP/Laravel expertise for production backend support, along with working knowledge of AWS and containerized deployments. The ideal candidate will have 5 to 7 years of experience supporting live transactional web platforms, with hands-on experience in MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey, Docker, and AWS ECS. The role requires end-to-end ownership of production incidents, from L3 triage and root-cause analysis through deployment coordination, while collaborating with frontend, mobile, and DevOps teams.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own L3 triage and resolution of incidents across all production APIs, websites, and portals.
• Diagnose and resolve application errors, queue/job failures, and performance bottlenecks in production
• Troubleshoot and debug critical production incidents by analysing application performance, MySQL/PostgreSQL query plans, slow-query logs, and Redis/Valkey cache and session diagnostics.
• Monitor and support AWS ECS containers, including CloudWatch log analysis, service redeployment, and coordination on scaling or health-check issues.
• Serve as the technical liaison with the support vendor by triaging tickets, validating RCAs, and progressively transitioning vendor-managed support areas in-house.
• Maintain and improve technical documentation, runbooks, monitoring coverage, and service/database health checks
• Escalate and document security- and fraud-related incidents in accordance with governance processes.
• Transition from production support into feature development, building and enhancing application functionality.
• Mentor junior developers and contribute to continuous improvement of engineering practices.
• Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, and sprint planning.

Technical Skills and Experience:

• PHP 8.x and Laravel (versions 9 through 12/13) with strong debugging ability in an existing, multi-repo codebase.
• Laravel Octane/Swoole understanding of long-running worker processes and their failure modes.
• MySQL and PostgreSQL — comfortable reading/writing queries, indexes, and diagnosing performance issues.
• Redis/Valkey — caching, session, and queue driver troubleshooting.
• Docker and AWS ECS — reading logs, redeploying containers, basic task-definition/environment changes.
• Linux CLI fundamentals — log tailing, process inspection, basic networking (curl, DNS, ports).
• Experience working in a production support/L2-L3 role for a live SaaS or transactional platform (fintech, logistics, ride-hailing, e-commerce are strong analogs).

Good to Have:

• Working knowledge of JavaScript/TypeScript with React or Preact, Vite, and Tailwind.
• Exposure to Node.js/Express/Socket.IO and JWT-based authentication.

Experience:

• 5–7 years of experience, with at least 1–2 years in production support/SRE-adjacent role on a live PHP/Laravel platform.
• Demonstrated ability to progress from production support into feature development on the same codebase.