Senior PHP Application Engineer

Sourceability is building a new Global Engineering Organization (GEO) to strengthen internal software delivery, improve production ownership, and build long-term engineering capability inside the company.

We are looking for a Senior PHP Application Engineer to help maintain, stabilize, improve, and modernize Sourceability's PHP-based applications and integrations. This role is important for keeping existing business-critical systems reliable while GEO builds stronger long-term engineering ownership and delivery discipline. This role will work hybrid from our Budapest office. 

This is not only a greenfield development role. The right candidate must be comfortable working with existing and legacy PHP codebases, understanding current behavior, fixing production defects, improving maintainability, cleaning up integrations, and making safe changes without disrupting business operations.

The Senior PHP Application Engineer will work closely with Product / Delivery Managers, Product Group Team Leads / Architects, QA, DevOps, DBA, Infrastructure, and business stakeholders to support stable delivery and reduce production risk.

Insight on Your Impact:

• Maintain, stabilize, and improve existing PHP applications, backend services, and integrations that support Sourceability business operations.
• Diagnose and resolve production defects, application issues, performance problems, data inconsistencies, and integration failures.
• Develop new features and enhancements when needed, while keeping changes safe, maintainable, and aligned with business priorities.
• Read, understand, and improve legacy PHP code without creating unnecessary rewrites or production disruption.
• Refactor problematic areas of the codebase where practical to improve maintainability, reliability, security, and testability.
• Build and maintain integrations between PHP applications, internal systems, third-party platforms, APIs, ERP systems, and data stores.
• Partner with Product / Delivery Managers to clarify requirements, acceptance criteria, defects, enhancement requests, and business impact.
• Partner with Product Group Team Leads / Architects to align implementation decisions with technical direction, modernization plans, and engineering standards.
• Work with QA to improve test coverage, regression validation, defect reproduction, and release readiness for PHP applications.
• Work with DevOps, DBA, Infrastructure, and Security teams to troubleshoot deployment issues, environment problems, database performance concerns, and operational risks.
• Participate in code reviews and help raise code quality, documentation discipline, and maintainability across PHP systems.
• Document existing behavior, integrations, known risks, support procedures, and technical decisions where documentation is missing or outdated.
• Support L3 technical escalation for PHP applications and contribute to root cause analysis after production incidents.
• Identify technical debt, fragile integrations, single points of failure, and modernization opportunities, then propose practical remediation steps.
• Mentor less experienced engineers when needed and share knowledge about application behavior, codebase structure, and safe change practices.

Your Qualifications, Your Influence:

• 5+ years of professional PHP experience, 3+ years with Symfony
• Modern PHP 8.x with strict typing discipline
• Deep Symfony knowledge (6.x LTS): Dependency Injection, Security, Workflow, and especially Messenger
• Hands-on production experience with RabbitMQ / AMQP and message-driven architectures
• Strong Doctrine ORM + PostgreSQL skills: query optimization, batch processing of large datasets, migrations, custom DBAL types
• Solid REST API design — API Platform, FOSRest/JMS, or equivalent, with OpenAPI documentation
• Frontend development with Vue (2 or 3) and Twig; TypeScript proficiency
• Authentication and security: JWT, SAML/SSO
• Third-party API integration with resilience patterns (retries, rate limiting)
• ETL-style data pipelines: streaming processing of large CSV/XML/JSON files
• Strong testing culture: PHPUnit and Behat, comfort with strict PHPStan rules and CI quality gates
• Docker-first development workflow

Preferred Skills and Technical Familiarity:

• API mocking / contract testing with WireMock
• Search engines: OpenSearch / Elasticsearch
• Real-time updates with Mercure (SSE)
• Kubernetes (Kustomize, Rancher, or EKS), GitLab CI, AWS S3
• Observability and profiling: Datadog, Sentry, Blackfire
• Report and document generation (PhpSpreadsheet, PDF/XLSX)
• ERP integrations (e.g., Oracle NetSuite / SuiteQL), SFTP-based file exchange
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture experience
• Domain exposure: PIM, e-commerce, catalog, or supply-chain systems
• Data platforms (Snowflake), web scraping
• EasyAdmin or similar admin-panel tooling

Success in the First 90 Days:

• Understand the main PHP applications, business workflows, users, integrations, data flows, environments, and production risks.
• Build working relationships with Product / Delivery Managers, Product Group Team Leads / Architects, QA, DevOps, DBA, Infrastructure, Security, and business stakeholders.
• Identify the most important production issues, fragile integrations, technical debt areas, missing documentation, and maintainability risks.
• Improve visibility into active PHP defects, enhancement requests, support items, and technical risks through agreed tracking tools such as Azure DevOps where applicable.
• Successfully deliver safe fixes or improvements to existing PHP applications without disrupting business operations.
• Improve code review, documentation, troubleshooting, and release readiness practices for PHP systems.
• Help define an initial stabilization and modernization plan for assigned PHP applications.
• Support L3 investigation and root cause analysis for at least one significant defect, integration issue, or production risk area if needed.
• Create or update practical technical documentation for key workflows, integrations, support procedures, or known risks.

What This Role Does Not Own:

This role does not own formal people management. Engineering Managers remain responsible for hiring, performance management, compensation input, team structure, and capacity planning.

This role does not own business prioritization or user acceptance. Product / Delivery Managers and business stakeholders remain responsible for intake, priority alignment, UAT coordination, and business acceptance.

This role does not independently define the full modernization strategy for legacy PHP platforms without alignment with Product Group Team Leads / Architects, Engineering Managers, Product / Delivery Managers, and GEO leadership.

This role does not independently commit delivery dates without alignment with Engineering Managers and Product / Delivery Managers.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• Ongoing training and professional development opportunities
• Collaborative global work environment
• PTO