Senior Backend Developer (PHP / Laravel)

About Jack Westin

Jack Westin is a leading Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) preparation company which is known for crafting high quality, but free, practice materials. The MCAT tests students on the scientific reasoning skills and scientific knowledge which can be learned during typical undergraduate coursework.

Our Three Principles

As we continue to grow and help students, we are guided by three major principles that we believe are vital to our community.

Attention to quality

We only create courses and practice questions that we would use. That means having the best, first-class teaching content that can possibly exist. We're not satisfied with mediocrity. We don't care about the amount of time or money it takes to get something done right. If it's not perfect, we won't stop until we believe it is. This ethos runs deep within our company.

Excellence in support

We're obsessed with our students. Their well-being and success drives us each day. Great customer service is not an afterthought. It is the most important service we can offer. We understand that our students come from different learning backgrounds. It's our mission to ensure that each one has an amazing experience.

Learn from anywhere at anytime

We are committed to building the future of education on the internet so that it is easily accessible to all students from around the world. Our dedication is to all students who want to learn, regardless of their pace, and no matter what time of the day it is.

About the Role (Remote | $2,000–$2,500/month)

We are hiring a Senior PHP Laravel Software Engineer to lead backend architecture, mentor engineering teams, and build high-performance, scalable systems for JackWestin’s online learning platform. This role requires strong technical leadership and deep Laravel expertise.

You will work closely with the team lead, Product, frontend, and QA to turn features into reliable, well-designed services, and you will be expected to contribute to technical planning and architecture decisions, not simply execute predefined tickets.

Responsibilities

• Lead backend architecture and technical decisions.
• Design scalable and secure distributed systems.
• Develop and maintain the PHP services and APIs that power our online learning platform.
• Build and optimize high-performance APIs and services.
• Work with the team lead to clarify the technical approach, break features into manageable tasks, and flag dependencies or blockers early.
• Lead technical planning and estimation.
• Design and update database schemas, write migrations, and optimize queries as the platform grows.
• Build and maintain integrations with third-party services, including payment and video providers.
• Write automated tests for new features and bug fixes, review teammates’ merge requests, and document API changes that affect other teams.
• Review and enforce engineering best practices.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
• Collaborate with frontend developers, Product, QA, and business stakeholders to agree on API contracts, clarify expected behavior, and verify features before release.
• Handle critical production incidents: investigate issues using logs and monitoring, fix root causes, and add regression tests where appropriate.
• Improve the security, performance, scalability, and maintainability of existing services through regular fixes and refactoring.
• Improve CI/CD and deployment workflows.
• Drive engineering process improvements.

What we’re looking for

• 6+ years of PHP development experience.
• Deep Laravel framework expertise.
• Advanced database architecture knowledge.
• Strong system design and scalability experience.
• Experience with queues, Redis, caching, and event-driven systems.
• CI/CD and DevOps understanding.
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, etc.).
• Strong debugging and performance optimization skills.
• Leadership and mentoring experience.

Nice to have

• Microservices architecture.
• Kubernetes and container orchestration.
• Event sourcing/CQRS knowledge.
• High-traffic application experience.
• Security auditing experience.

What We Offer

• 100% remote, full-time position
• $2,000–$2,500/month (depending on experience)
• Real ownership and impact