Back End Developer

Bachelor's

Job Brief:

We are seeking an experienced Backend Developer to lead our backend team and own the technical direction of our project platform. You will balance hands-on development with team leadership: designing scalable backend services, guiding architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and driving delivery across sales, inventory, payments, loyalty, and reporting modules.

Our current stack is Laravel, PHP, and MySQL. You will maintain and extend this while leading a pragmatic migration toward a more modern, service-oriented backend (TypeScript/NestJS or equivalent) without disrupting live merchant operations.

This is a high-ownership role in a fast-growing startup. You will work directly with product, frontend, QA, and DevOps, and you will shape how the engineering team works, not just what it ships.

Job Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership

• Own backend architecture for the platform: API design, service boundaries, data models, and integration patterns.
• Define and enforce engineering standards: code review practices, testing strategy, CI/CD, documentation, and release discipline.
• Lead technical planning and estimation with product and engineering leadership.
• Mentor backend engineers through code reviews, pairing, and career growth.

Platform and Delivery

• Design and develop scalable backend systems for our product based on POS operations across retail, restaurants, and multi-location merchants.
• Build and maintain secure, high-performance RESTful APIs for web, mobile, and in-store clients.
• Own modules for sales transactions, inventory, customer management, loyalty, and reporting data feeds.
• Integrate payment gateways, POS hardware services, and third-party business systems.
• Optimize MySQL (and future PostgreSQL) for high-volume transactional workloads and reporting use cases.
• Implement authentication, authorization, and multi-tenant data isolation best practices.
• Support multi-store and multi-location of POS operations with reliability and performance at scale.

Migration and Modernization

• Lead incremental migration from Laravel monolith to modern service architecture (e.g. NestJS/TypeScript services).
• Define API contracts and integration boundaries between legacy and new services.
• Identify high-risk areas (payments, inventory sync, reporting) and prioritize safe migration paths.

Operations

• Troubleshoot production issues and drive root-cause fixes, not just patches.
• Partner with DevOps on deployment, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Ensure high system availability, performance, and scalability as merchant volume grows.

Who You Are:

• You have led backend teams (3-8 engineers) or been the senior technical owner in a small, fast-moving product team.
• You thrive in a high-growth startup: ambiguous requirements, shifting priorities, and the need to ship while building scale.
• You are hands-on. You still write code, review PRs, and debug production issues. You do not lead from slides only.
• You communicate clearly with product managers, non-technical stakeholders, and junior engineers.
• You are pragmatic about rewrites: you know when to refactor, when to strangle, and when to leave working code alone.

Technical Skills and Qualifications:

• Strong hands-on experience with PHP and Laravel (current production stack).
• Expertise in MySQL: schema design, indexing, query optimization, transactions, and data integrity at scale.
• Strong understanding of RESTful API Development.
• Experience working with POS, Retail, Restaurant, ERP, Inventory, or E-commerce Applications.
• Payment gateway integrations.
• Authentication and authorization: JWT, OAuth, role-based access, multi-tenant scoping.
• Strong understanding of Database Indexing, Transactions, and Data Integrity.
• Git, code review workflows, and collaborative development practices.
• Familiarity with Linux-based deployment environments.

Preferred Skills

• Experience leading migration from monolith to services (Laravel to NestJS/Node, or similar).
• TypeScript / NestJS or another modern backend framework for greenfield services.
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture and tenant isolation patterns.
• AWS cloud services, Docker, and containerized deployments.
• PostgreSQL and experience planning database migration or dual-write strategies.
• POS hardware integrations: barcode scanners, receipt printers, cash drawers.
• Reporting and analytics integration (event pipelines, data APIs for merchant dashboards).
• Microservices architecture, message queues, and event-driven patterns.

Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science / Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum 7 yrs of Experience