Staff Software Engineer - PHP Backend in Durham

ServiceTrade empowers commercial service contractors in fire protection, HVAC, mechanical, electrical, and beyond to service smarter and scale faster. Our platform helps thousands of contractors maximize technician productivity, deliver digital-first customer experiences, and grow profitably. When skilled techs are hard to find and manual systems slow you down, ServiceTrade is how the best contractors pull ahead. Under the hood, that mission runs on a serious piece of engineering: a multi-tenant SaaS platform built on PHP, Doctrine, MySQL, MongoDB, and AWS, processing the real-time workflows that keep commercial service operations moving.

We're hiring a Staff Engineer to help write that chapter. You'll join a team that's investing in the long-term health of this platform: evolving the architecture, modernizing incrementally, improving reliability, leaning into AI acceleration tooling, and building the infrastructure to scale the next phase of growth, all without breaking what works for the thousands of contractors who depend on us every day. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll own critical architectural decisions across backend and infrastructure, mentor engineers, and shape how we build software in this new world of agentic AI.

Key Responsibilities and Activities:

• Architecture & Technical Leadership: Own and evolve the architecture of our core backend platform: a large PHP/Doctrine monolith with event-driven async processing and CQRS read models, and a growing number of Node microservices. Drive technical strategy for database sharding, read-replica routing, multi-tenant isolation, and schema migration across MySQL shards. Lead incremental modernization efforts, including migrating frameworks, extracting services, and adopting modern PHP patterns, while maintaining production stability and velocity.
• Backend Engineering & Data Performance: Design, build, and maintain scalable RESTful APIs and backend services in PHP. Own query performance across sharded MySQL databases: analyze execution plans, design indexing strategies, identify and eliminate slow queries, and optimize Doctrine ORM/DBAL usage to prevent N+1s and unnecessary hydration.
• CI/CD, Developer Experience & QA Infrastructure: Own and improve GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines, covering build, test, and packaging stages with matrix strategies and artifact caching. Manage and optimize Docker-based development and CI environments.
• AI First: A believer and practitioner in the use of the latest AI tools and concepts to achieve maximum productivity. Collaborate with our Principal AI Engineer to champion an 'AI-first' engineering culture.
• Mentorship & Team Impact: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, pairing, and architectural guidance. Raise the bar on code quality, testing practices, and operational readiness.

Knowledge and Skills:

• 8+ years of professional software development experience with deep expertise in backend PHP.
• Proven track record operating and evolving large, long-lived PHP codebases in production.
• Expert-level MySQL knowledge.
• Demonstrated experience using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar LLM-based assistants.
• Mastery of automated testing best practices.
• Deep experience with Doctrine ORM and ODM.
• Strong production experience with MongoDB.
• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS.
• Strong experience designing and operating asynchronous processing systems.
• Production experience with Redis for caching.
• Strong Docker and Docker Compose skills.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Nice to Have:

• Experience modernizing large PHP monoliths.
• Familiarity with Typesense, Elasticsearch, or similar search infrastructure.
• Experience with Auth0 or other identity/SSO platforms.
• Familiarity with Kinesis, CloudWatch, or other AWS observability tooling.

A few things you want to know:

Founded in 2012, ServiceTrade is the software platform for commercial mechanical and fire contractors. More than 1,300 contractors use ServiceTrade to increase profit and deliver more work during a persistent skilled labor shortage.

What kind of working environment do you have? We’ve transitioned from a start-up to a scale-up -- that means we still have the spirit and energy of a start-up and are adding new people who will help us expand our business faster and run our business smarter.

What kind of benefits do you offer?

• Medical through Cigna, PPO and HDHP options.
• Company-paid Life insurance, STD and LTD.
• 401(k) with up to 3% employer match.
• Flexible PTO policy.
• Paid Time Off for Volunteering.

EEO Statement: ServiceTrade provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type.