Staff Software Engineer - PHP Backend

Durham, NC

Position Description:

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. It's battle-tested, revenue-generating, and architecturally complex. It's also ready for its next chapter.

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. If you've ever looked at a complex production system and thought "I know how to make this better, one piece at a time," this is the job.

Why ServiceTrade:

  • Real problems at real scale. Sharded MySQL, MongoDB read models, event-driven async processing, multi-tenant isolation: this isn't a CRUD app. You'll work on genuinely interesting distributed systems challenges with real customers depending on the outcome.
  • Modernization with purpose. Our platform has years of production-hardened domain logic. The opportunity isn't to rewrite it, it's to evolve it. Incrementally migrate frameworks, extract services where it makes sense, adopt modern patterns, and improve developer experience, all while keeping the lights on for thousands of customers. This is the kind of work that separates good engineers from great ones.
  • First-Class Tooling. You will be equipped with the latest AI-assisted tooling available to help you navigate, refactor, and modernize our complex codebase more efficiently.  
  • Influence without bureaucracy. This is a team where a staff engineer's voice carries real weight. You won't be writing RFCs that disappear into a committee. You'll propose a direction, build consensus, and ship it.

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
  • Design and improve our event pipeline: domain events, SQS-based async processing, MongoDB projections, and worker infrastructure
  • Make and document architectural decisions, weighing trade-offs and building consensus across the team

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
  • Lead schema design and migration strategy across shards, balancing normalization, query performance, and operational safety
  • Write and optimize complex queries across sharded MySQL databases using Doctrine ORM/DBAL
  • Build and operate MongoDB document models and projections via Doctrine ODM
  • Architect message-driven workflows: SQS producers/consumers, long-polling workers, idempotency, DLQ/redrive strategies, deduplication, and visibility-timeout tuning
  • Implement and improve caching strategies across APCu, Redis, and query-level caches, including stampede protection
  • Integrate with third-party systems (accounting platforms, identity providers, search infrastructure)

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 (multi-service Compose stacks, LocalStack for AWS mocking, ephemeral database strategies)
  • Partner with SRE on QA server provisioning, production infrastructure, deployment processes, and observability, contributing CloudFormation changes and monitoring improvements as needed
  • Champion environment parity between development, CI, QA, and production
  • Ensure new features have appropriate application-level observability and work with SRE to surface metrics, dashboards, and alerts

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, providing the guidance and best practices necessary for the team to use AI as a force multiplier in their daily delivery and modernization efforts
  • Using AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar LLM-based assistants to accelerate code comprehension, refactoring, and the modernization of legacy systems
  • Ensure proper attention to security, performance, and trustworthiness of AI features

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
    Identify systemic issues (tech debt, reliability gaps, developer experience friction) and drive solutions
  • Collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, QA, and devops to shape the technical approach for major initiatives

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. You've modernized systems, not just built greenfield
  • Expert-level MySQL knowledge: you can read and tune execution plans, design indexing strategies for complex access patterns, reason about locking behavior, and optimize queries across replicated and sharded databases
  • Demonstrated experience using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar LLM-based assistants to accelerate code comprehension, refactoring, and the modernization of legacy systems
  • Mastery of automated testing best practices (TDD, contract testing, spec-oriented testing, and CI/CD integration) using PHPUnit and Jest; a history of coaching teams on how to balance test coverage with developer velocity while maintaining a 'zero-regression' mindset
  • Deep experience with Doctrine ORM and ODM (entity mapping, repositories, query builder, hydration strategies, proxy generation, N+1 prevention, lazy/eager loading trade-offs)
  • Strong production experience with MongoDB (document modeling, aggregation pipelines, ODM tooling)
  • Extensive hands-on experience with AWS: CloudFormation/Terraform, EC2, RDS, S3, SQS, SES, Lambda, ElastiCache, VPC networking, IAM policies
  • Strong experience designing and operating asynchronous processing systems (SQS or equivalent), including worker supervision, DLQ strategies, idempotency, backoff/jitter, and visibility-timeout management
  • Production experience with Redis for caching, session management, and distributed locking
  • Strong Docker and Docker Compose skills for development, CI, and packaging workflows
  • Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions preferred)
  • Working knowledge of AWS services (EC2, RDS, S3, SQS, SES, Lambda, ElastiCache, VPC networking) sufficient to troubleshoot, contribute infrastructure-as-code changes, and collaborate effectively with SRE
  • Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, make architectural trade-offs, and influence without authority
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills; comfortable producing technical documentation and RFCs

Nice to Have:

  • Experience modernizing large PHP monoliths: incrementally migrating frameworks, extracting services, or evolving architecture while maintaining production stability
  • Experience with CQRS and event-sourcing patterns
  • Familiarity with Typesense, Elasticsearch, or similar search infrastructure
  • Experience with Auth0 or other identity/SSO platforms and patterns
  • Experience with configuration management (Puppet, Ansible) or infrastructure automation
  • Familiarity with Kinesis, CloudWatch, or other AWS observability tooling
  • Experience with static analysis tools (Psalm) and automated refactoring (Rector)
  • Familiarity with frontend frameworks (React, Ember.js), enough to collaborate effectively with frontend engineers
  • Experience with serverless patterns (AWS Lambda, SAM)
  • Background in multi-tenant SaaS architecture and data isolation strategies

A few things you want to know:

What does ServiceTrade do?

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 by improving service and project operations, helping technicians be more productive and do their best work, selling more service and inspection agreements, and growing customer loyalty. Over 10% of the commercial or industrial buildings in the United States are serviced by contractors using ServiceTrade to manage 13 million equipment assets and invoice more than $7.5 billion of service-related commerce. 

Ok, so why should I care about that?

Our customers are smart, hard-working people who we enjoy serving. We help them grow their business to earn more revenue, employ more blue-collar workers, and become more valuable to their customers. It’s why we get excited about serving a market that you might never have thought about before.

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. We have big ambitions and every employee understands our goals and what their role is in achieving them. Read about our company culture on our About Us page. 

What kind of benefits do you offer?

  • Medical through Cigna, PPO and HDHP options, including a Health Savings Account with company contributions Dental and Vision through Unum
  • Flexible Spending Account and Dependant Care Account 
  • Company-paid Life insurance, STD and LTD 
  • Voluntary benefits including Supplemental Life Insurance, Critical Illness, Accident and Pet Insurance 
  • 401(k) with up to 3% employer match and NO vesting period
  • Flexible PTO policy
  • 10 company holidays
  • Parental Leave 
  • Paid Time Off for Volunteering 
  • Employee Reimbursement Program to use for well-being, technology and/or professional development 

#LI-Remote

EEO Statement:
ServiceTrade provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

This employer participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.

ServiceTrade is not registered to hire in all 50 states. You must reside in one of the states listed to be considered.
(AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, MD, MI, MN, MO, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA)

Please Be Aware of Recruiting Scams

To protect yourself against the increasing number of recruiting scams, please make sure that you are communicating with ServiceTrade. We communicate through our corporate website servicetrade.com, through corporate emails utilizing our domain name of @servicetrade.com, and through servicetrade.greenhouse.io. Be vigilant when checking domains because imitators often make very small changes to trick the eye. Additionally, please know that ServiceTrade does not use text messaging or public messaging platforms, such as Telegram or Whatsapp, to make initial contact with candidates and ServiceTrade will never ask an employment candidate for financial information or for payment of any kind.

 

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