About Smart Working
At Smart Working, we believe your job should not only look right on paper but also feel right every day. This isn’t just another remote opportunity — it’s about finding where you truly belong, no matter where you are. From day one, you’re welcomed into a genuine community that values your growth and well-being.
Our mission is simple: to break down geographic barriers and connect skilled professionals with outstanding global teams and products for full-time, long-term roles. We help you discover meaningful work with teams that invest in your success, where you’re empowered to grow personally and professionally.
Join one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor and experience what it means to thrive in a truly remote-first world.
About the Role
As a Senior PHP/Symfony Engineer, you will take hands-on ownership of backend development within a mature Symfony platform that manages marketing and revenue data for enterprise customers. The core application currently runs on Symfony 6.1, with an upgrade to Symfony 7 planned, alongside an Angular front end and TypeScript and Python AI agent microservices.
This is a strongly backend-weighted, senior hands-on engineering role requiring an architect mindset, strong independence and the ability to understand how technical decisions affect the wider system. You will work within a remote, cross-functional product squad alongside engineering, product, QA and DevOps colleagues.
Responsibilities
- Take ownership of backend development within the core Symfony application, becoming fully independent in delivering work within 2–3 months of joining.
- Review and critically assess code written by the team and AI tools, challenging proposed approaches and making sure key considerations have been properly addressed.
- Support the migration from Symfony 6.1 to Symfony 7 by resolving versioning, compatibility and legacy issues currently preventing the upgrade.
- Improve the application’s performance, scalability and maintainability, making it easier and safer to introduce new functionality.
- Work across the Angular front end, TypeScript and Python-based AI agent services, collaborating with DevOps where backend changes impact other areas of the system.
- Be comfortable reading and understanding the Angular/TypeScript codebase, even though the role is primarily backend focused. Strong front-end development experience is not required.
- Understand the wider impact of technical decisions across Symfony, Angular and AI services, while spotting gaps or issues in both human-written and AI-generated code.
- Question existing approaches, identify root causes and look for better ways of building things rather than simply completing assigned tickets.
- Deliver thoughtful, maintainable solutions within a legacy codebase while maintaining a consistent pace of delivery.
- Work with a high level of autonomy and ownership while collaborating effectively with a remote, cross-functional team.
- Follow SOC 2, PII and security requirements consistently and without exception.
Requirements
- 8+ years of commercial software engineering experience, including at least 5 years working with PHP.
- 7+ years of Expert-level PHP development experience.
- 3+ years of recent commercial experience with Symfony 6.x/7 at Advanced level. Strong senior-level Laravel experience may be considered where the experience is clearly transferable and the candidate has a good understanding of the differences between Laravel and Symfony.
- 4+ years of Advanced experience in backend architecture, system design and scalability.
- 2+ years of Advanced experience using AI development tools critically, including reviewing, validating and challenging AI-generated code rather than accepting it without question.
- 5+ years of Advanced MySQL experience, including database schema design and query optimisation. Equivalent depth of experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database may also be considered.
- At least 1 year of experience working with or understanding Angular/TypeScript. Experience with React or Vue using TypeScript may also be considered, but some front-end exposure is essential.
- 3+ years of Advanced experience with automated testing using PHPUnit. Experience with Pest or another equivalent PHP testing framework may also be considered.
- At least 1 year of Intermediate experience working on framework upgrades and modernising legacy codebases. Experience with major-version upgrades or significant refactoring in other large PHP applications may be considered.
- 2+ years of Intermediate AWS experience. Equivalent experience with Azure or GCP may also be considered.
- Fluent written and spoken English.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to work effectively in a remote environment.
- Ability to work UK hours.
- Ability to successfully complete strict background checks and adhere to PII and data protection requirements.
- Strong self-sufficiency, with the ability to operate independently and without handholding after 2–3 months, while continuing to collaborate effectively with the wider team.
- A hands-on engineering approach combined with an architectural mindset, with the ability to understand how and why the wider system works rather than focusing only on writing code.
Nice to Have
- 2+ years of Intermediate CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions; GitLab CI, Jenkins or Azure DevOps are suitable alternatives.
- Basic experience with Amazon Redshift or data warehousing; Snowflake or BigQuery may be considered.
- Azure exposure alongside AWS.
- Previous project leadership experience.
- Previous mentoring and technical leadership experience with other engineers.
