Senior Software Engineer (PHP/Laravel)

About the Project:

Things are a little different here because we aren’t just another company. There’s more to Global BrainForce than our innovative technology and agile methodology. We are a Global BrainForce of talented, passionate developers – and together is what makes us who we are as a company.

We care about what we are doing.

The client is an established, Sydney-based education provider . Students across their centres rely on their online learning platform — a Laravel/PHP + MySQL application running in the cloud — supported by a growing in-house data and AI stack (reporting pipelines, analytics dashboards).

The platform runs on Azure today and is partway through a move to AWS.

They are bringing platform engineering fully in-house, and this role is the cornerstone of that move: one senior engineer who runs the platform end-to-end — backend, database, security, and operations — working directly with the Sydney-based technical lead.

What you'll do:

• Run the Laravel/PHP + MySQL platform in production — architecture,
    maintenance, and the roadmap of improvements
• Manage the database — data-model and schema design, performance, and
    capacity as the platform grows.
• Run cloud operations — deployment, monitoring, backups and disaster
    recovery, and participate in on-call, across both Azure and AWS during and
    after the migration.
• Take charge of security — access control, authN/authZ, and regular review of
    a platform that holds sensitive student data. Security here is an engineering
    responsibility, not a checkbox.
• Build out observability — structured logging, observability platforms
    (e.g. Sentry), metrics and tracing, so that any front-end symptom can be
    traced to its backend cause in minutes.
• Enforce release discipline — reproducible builds, pinned dependencies,
    CI/CD, and staged releases where nothing reaches production without passing
    the pipeline.

You will report directly to the technical lead in Sydney, work exclusively on the product, and set direction rather than take tickets. The platform also connects to a Python-based internal data/AI stack (reporting dashboards,
analytics, AI marking pipelines) run by the technical lead — you'll work closely with them on the integration points, with the option to contribute to those systems too.

What You Need to Get the Job Done (Minimum Qualifications)

Must have

• 5 years' professional experience, including at least one role where you ran a production system end-to-end. You're senior enough to operate independently — and hands-on enough to want to.
• PHP/Laravel/JS web frameworks.
• Database engineering — strong SQL skills, sound data-model and schema design, and the general performance instincts to keep a growing database healthy.
• Cloud operations — both Azure and AWS. Deployment, monitoring, backup/DR.
• Security fundamentals — OWASP-level fluency: access control, common web vulnerabilities, and the habit of proactively thinking about this unprompted.
• Demonstrated success in complex, undocumented legacy codebases and systems. You can read your way into a system nobody hands over properly.
• Observability practice — you instrument what you build and correlate symptoms to causes with logs, observability platforms, metrics, and traces.
• Release/build engineering — deterministic builds, committed lockfiles, CI/CD discipline
• Front-end competence — a modern JS framework, able to ship UI unassisted.

Nice to have

• Cloud migration experience — having moved a production workload between providers, ideally Azure to AWS, with no data loss and minimal downtime.
• Education-sector experience
• Data-migration / ETL experience
• Sydney or near-Sydney timezone alignment (for the Philippines-based engagement, substantial working-hours overlap with AEST).
• Python — our internal data/AI tooling is Python.
• Containerised deployment — Docker, and PaaS platforms (e.g. Azure App Service, Elastic
    Beanstalk, Railway).

What You'll Love About Us

• HMO and government-mandated benefits covered
• Remote work opportunity.
• Regular training and upskilling opportunities
• Healthy working times
• Supportive, no-drama work culture focused on quality delivery.
• Corporate events, team buildings, etc.