Sr Software Developer - PHP

Job Description

Higher Logic Vanilla is seeking a Senior Software Developer (Backend / PHP) to join our team. This role focuses on backend and platform development, requiring strong product thinking, sound engineering judgment, and effective collaboration with product, QA, support, and other engineers.

• Build, maintain, and ship high-quality product features in a multidisciplinary Agile team.
• Design and evolve backend systems that support large-scale, highly configurable community applications.
• Work across core application layers, APIs, integrations, and platform capabilities to deliver reliable end-to-end solutions.
• Write reliable, well-tested code; participate in code review; mentor teammates through thoughtful feedback and shared patterns.
• Triage, debug, and resolve production issues efficiently; collaborate closely with product, QA, support, and other engineers to close the loop quickly.
• Contribute to application performance, scalability, resilience, and maintainability across a large and evolving codebase.
• Help shape technical direction by improving architecture, coding standards, tooling, documentation, and team development practices.
• Participate in guild or cross-team engineering discussions to strengthen backend practices and promote sustainable patterns across the organization.
• AI-Forward Development Responsibilities:
• Use AI-powered IDEs and assistants (e.g., Cursor, Copilot-style tools) to accelerate implementation, refactoring, debugging, and test generation while ensuring correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Apply AI thoughtfully: write strong prompts, verify outputs, and incorporate guardrails such as automated tests, static analysis, code review, and runtime validation.
• Partner on AI-enabled product and platform initiatives where relevant, including areas like moderation tooling, content workflows, search and discovery, summarization, admin productivity, and internal developer efficiency.

What You'll Do

• Build, maintain, and ship high-quality product features in a multidisciplinary Agile team.
• Design and evolve backend systems that support large-scale, highly configurable community applications.
• Work across core application layers, APIs, integrations, and platform capabilities to deliver reliable end-to-end solutions.
• Write reliable, well-tested code; participate in code review; mentor teammates through thoughtful feedback and shared patterns.
• Triage, debug, and resolve production issues efficiently; collaborate closely with product, QA, support, and other engineers to close the loop quickly.
• Contribute to application performance, scalability, resilience, and maintainability across a large and evolving codebase.
• Help shape technical direction by improving architecture, coding standards, tooling, documentation, and team development practices.
• Participate in guild or cross-team engineering discussions to strengthen backend practices and promote sustainable patterns across the organization.

Desired Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience building and maintaining production web applications.
• Experience working in a large, mature application or platform with significant business logic, legacy considerations, and evolving architecture.
• Experience with extensible or modular systems such as themes, plugins, integrations, or configurable platform features.
• Experience working with asynchronous processing, background jobs, queues, or event-driven patterns.
• Familiarity with database-backed applications and the performance considerations that come with them.
• Experience with testing practices and tools that build confidence through automation.
• Strong product instincts: you communicate tradeoffs well, care about user outcomes, and understand how technical decisions affect the customer experience.
• Experience contributing to technical mentoring, architectural improvements, or shared engineering standards.