PHP Leads

Strong proficiency and experience in PHP backend development in a high-traffic consumer product environment

      Proven track record of shipping code and operating production systems at scale - you've owned features through rollout, monitoring, and incident debugging

      Solid understanding of API design and client-server communication patterns

      Experience serving mobile clients (API versioning across long-tail app versions)

      Comfortable using AI tools such as Claude Code

      Ability to document and communicate technical approaches clearly

      Solid distributed-systems fundamentals like caching, queues, idempotency, failure modes, back-pressure

      Ability to work cross-functionally with mobile engineers, QA, product managers, and designers. Strong collaboration and communication skills

      Experience with schema-driven APIs (Protobuf/gRPC)

      A disciplined testing and code-review habit

      Ownership mentality: you follow your code into production and monitor graphs

      Familiarity with GCP

      Experience with optimizing applications, identifying bottlenecks, and implementing monitoring/visualization tooling where needed

      Solid foundation and experience with MySQL, plus caching layers and high-availability backend systems. SQL depth - schema design, indexing, and query plans at large scale

      Comfort working with monetisation and payment flows (credits, subscriptions, in-app purchases)

Nice to have

      Computer Science/Tech related degrees

      Aerospike, ClickHouse, or other specialised datastores

      Experience evolving a large monolith

      Track record of building and deploying production-ready services

      Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment practices (TeamCity or similar)

      Experience with containerization technologies, including hands-on experience with Kubernetes

      Familiarity with A/B testing frameworks and feature flagging for gradual rollouts

      Understanding of GDPR and data privacy requirements in a consumer context

Roles and Responsibilities

      Build for scale (mobile and web applications) handling millions of users and over a billion dynamic backend requests daily: sharding strategies, caching layers, replication, async pipelines, and query optimisation for tables with billions of rows, ensure system reliability

      Partner closely and collaborate cross-functionally with iOS and Android, QA, Product & Design teams - you will own the server side of the member experience

      Engage in the entire development process, from initial design to deployment and support

      Design and ship features end-to-end: protobuf API contract, business logic, data model, databases and storage design, supporting QA API as per requirements, rollout, and the dashboards that prove it works, monitoring feature post production. Proactively communicate with colleagues to refine application design

      Monitor key business metrics

      Maintain and evolve Badoo's core product systems and shared infrastructure (occasionally support other apps from Bumble Inc. portfolio that are in the monolith)

      Write unit and functional tests, extend coverage where it's thin

      Instrument, profile, and debug production systems with observability tooling

      Optimise backend code, look for bottlenecks

      Verify your changes end-to-end on supported devices using our test tooling to ensure high quality standard and delightful member experience for shipped changes

      Support the Badoo cloud migration to GCP (lift-and-shift, with evolution toward cloud-native patterns)

      Participate in code reviews (peers review code; complex changes also reviewed by component owners)

      Build and maintain monetisation logic like credits-based flows, subscription features

      Contribute to incident management - ensuring 100% of incidents are handled, postmortems written, and actions taken

Our stack: PHP 8.3 (modular monolith + custom framework) gRPC + Protocol Buffers (500+ proto contracts) MySQL, Aerospike, Redis/Memcached ClickHouse + Elasticsearch Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, and in-house CPQ event queues Kubernetes, Docker, RoadRunner Prometheus, OpenTelemetry/Jaeger, liveprof PHPUnit + soft-mocks TeamCity/GitHub Enterprise