Senior Backend Software Engineer (PHP / Laravel)

About Us Housecall is a tech-enabled primary care company delivering virtual and in-person care with a mission to measurably improve healthcare outcomes and people’s quality of life. Job Description This is a remote position. Senior Backend Software Engineer (PHP / Laravel) Housecall is redefining primary healthcare delivery with an AI-enabled technology platform. Join a small, ambitious team building the core applications behind a modern care experience. Housecall is a Hub71 Top Performer and was selected for the UAE Ministry of Economy’s Future 50 list of most promising Emirati startups. What you’ll work on You’ll help shape and scale the backend services that power patient and provider experiences. This includes reliable APIs, high-throughput data workflows, and integrations that support care delivery. As a senior engineer, you’ll own technical direction for key areas, raise engineering standards, and mentor teammates. Job Summary We’re looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer with deep PHP / Laravel experience to lead the design and evolution of core platform services. You’ll partner closely with product, frontend, and mobile engineers to deliver critical features, improve performance and reliability, and drive best practices across the codebase and delivery pipeline. Responsibilities Own and lead backend initiatives end-to-end: discovery, technical design, delivery, rollout, and iteration. Architect, build, and maintain backend services and REST APIs using Laravel/PHP. Drive system performance and production reliability (monitoring, incident response, root-cause fixes). Embed security into development with secure coding practices, least-privilege access, secrets handling, audit logging, encryption where appropriate. Support evidence collection for audits (policies, controls, change history, traceability) Design and evolve data models; manage migrations and ensure data integrity for MySQL and other database technologies. Establish and uplift engineering standards: code quality, testing strategy, API conventions, observability, and security practices. Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows. Collaborate cross-functionally to translate product requirements into scalable technical solutions. Mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and guidance on architecture and best practices. Create and maintain clear technical documentation (APIs, runbooks, architectural decision records). Requirements 5+ years building production backend systems, including 3+ years with PHP and Laravel. Proven experience designing scalable backend architectures. Strong relational database expertise (PostgreSQL/MySQL): schema design, indexing, query plans, migrations, and performance tuning. Strong API design experience (versioning, authentication/authorization, pagination, error handling, rate limiting). Strong testing mindset and execution (unit/feature/integration; PHPUnit/Pest) and comfort improving legacy code safely. Experience with production operations: debugging, monitoring, incident response, and postmortems. Strong communication and ability to lead technical discussions in a remote, cross-functional team. Nice to have Experience with CI/CD tooling such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, etc. Caching, queues, and async processing (Redis, Horizon, event-driven patterns). Observability tooling (metrics/logging/tracing) and pragmatic SRE practices. Cloud experience (Azure/AWS/GCP). Familiarity with healthcare interoperability standards (HL7 2.x and FHIR) and integration engines like Mirth Connect.