Senior Software Engineer

About the job

Job Overview
Mumzworld is scaling fast as an AI-native organization, and building reliable, scalable backend systems is key to our future.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer PHP (Laravel) who thinks beyond features - someone who builds maintainable systems, reusable components, and strong foundations for the engineering team.

In this role, you will build robust APIs and services powering our core e-commerce experience and go beyond:

• You will create reusable modules, enforce code quality standards, and help streamline development through automation and internal tooling.
• You will apply software engineering excellence - clean code, modular architecture, CI/CD, observability - to everything you build.
• You will think long term, building scalable, secure, and performant systems that reduce tech debt and increase team velocity.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services in Laravel — APIs, background workers, and event consumers that carry real production traffic.
• Own services end to end: schema design, implementation, tests, deployment pipeline, dashboards, and on-call for what you ship.
• Design and optimise relational schemas in MySQL,Postgresql, with attention to indexing, query performance, and migration safety at scale.
• Model DynamoDB tables around access patterns for the services where we use it, and know when a workload does not belong there.
• Build integrations between our services and the platforms around them — Magento, NetSuite, Algolia, and our carrier and logistics systems — with sane retries, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Use SQS and event-driven patterns to decouple services and keep them resilient when a dependency degrades.
• Apply Redis (ElastiCache) deliberately for caching and rate limiting, with clear invalidation rules rather than TTL guesswork.
• Write clean, tested PHP, and build reusable modules and internal tooling that make the rest of the team faster.
• Own CI/CD for your services and keep deployments boring and zero-downtime.
• Work fluently with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Codex, and similar), and help improve the AI development workflows our engineering teams already run on.

Experience

• 5+ years building production backend systems, with deep Laravel and modern PHP experience.
• Proven relational database skills — schema design, query optimisation, and safe migrations on MySQL or a MySQL-compatible engine.
• Solid AWS experience: RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, SQS, DynamoDB, and the operational side of running services there.
• Experience with microservices, queues, and event-driven architecture — including the failure modes, not just the happy path.
• Comfort with Docker, Linux, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience integrating with large third-party or legacy systems where you don't control the other side.
• Working proficiency with AI-assisted development tools, and judgement about where they help and where they don't.
• Familiarity with Jira and Confluence.
• Nice to have - exposure to Magento 2 as an integration target, or experience migrating services off a monolith.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days. You've shipped something real to production — not a starter ticket, a service or a feature with users behind it. You can draw how our Backend services and the systems around them actually fit together, including the parts that are ugly. Your code reviews have started catching things other people missed.

By 3 months. You own a service outright: schema, deploys, dashboards, and on-call. It has observability someone else can read at 2am and boundaries that are documented rather than tribal. Your code reviews are catching things other people missed, and you've made the case for fixing at least one thing that's architecturally wrong.

By six months. Other engineers are building on patterns you established, without being asked to. Incidents in your services are rarer, and the ones that happen are diagnosed in minutes instead of hours. Work that used to need three people coordinating now takes one — and the reason traces back to foundations you laid.

Why This Role Matters
Mumzworld is the largest e-commerce platform for parents and families in the region, and our backend carries every order, every catalogue update, and every stock and price change through it. As we scale and become an AI-native organisation, the constraint is not ideas — it is how quickly and safely we can build on top of what we already have.

We're not short of things we want to build. What decides how much of it actually ships is the state of the backend and services layer underneath. Clean boundaries and well-shaped schemas mean a new feature takes days and an incident is diagnosed in minutes. The alternative is every change needing three teams in a room and a rollback plan.

A small number of engineers get to decide which of those we live with over the next few years. This is one of those roles.

Who You Are

We’re looking for a builder: someone who engineers foundations that make others faster, safer, and more effective.

👤 Software Engineering Mindset – You build systems that are modular, observable, and maintainable — not throwaway scripts.

🏗️ Platform Thinker – You don’t just solve a request; you build reusable solutions that scale across teams.

🧠 Pragmatic Problem Solver – You find the right balance between speed, maintainability, and performance.

💬 Clear Communicator – You document your work, share your thinking, and collaborate effectively.

🚀 Independent and Impact-Driven – You proactively identify opportunities to automate, accelerate, and improve.

🤝 Team Player – You uplift others, share knowledge, and build a stronger data culture around you.