Lead Backend Developer (PHP / Symfony)

You’ll be solving complex challenges and maintaining our own infrastructure with 60PB+ monthly data traffic. Here are its scale and maturity in numbers:

• 6PB+ Ceph storage
• 60PB+ monthly data traffic through our systems
• 300k+ service requests/sec processed
• 500k+ Kafka messages/sec streamed

Our Dashboard team owns the self-service platform every Oxylabs customer uses - the product that directly moves company revenue. You'll step in as the hands-on Tech Lead for one of our squads (PLAG or EP), working side by side with our Principal Engineer and setting the technical bar for ~14 engineers across two squads. We're mid-way through a major V3 architecture migration and scaling fast, so this is a timely moment to join: there's real architectural room here to make meaningful decisions, not just execute someone else's design.

In this role, you will:

• Lead, mentor, and support one Dashboard squad while staying deeply hands-on in code - this is a genuine 50% IC role
• Design and develop scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems across our Symfony 7 backend
• Own the full development lifecycle for major features - from technical design and RFCs to deployment and production support
• Drive architecture decisions in partnership with our Principal Engineer and help finish shipping the V3 migration
• Raise engineering standards across code review, testing discipline, incident response, and observability
• Contribute to cross-team architecture at the Dashboard product level, including Payments integration and outbox/Kafka patterns
• Apply our leadership principles to guide your team and drive results

• Deep PHP experience with Symfony strongly preferred (we're on Symfony 7.2 / PHP 8.3), plus practical MySQL 8 skills - query optimisation, indexing, and migrations at scale
• Hands-on experience with Kafka, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and GitLab CI
• Solid architecture chops - event-driven patterns (outbox), dual-database designs, and API design
• Able to guide technical decisions, review designs and code, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers
• A clear communicator who takes ownership, enjoys knowledge sharing, and gives constructive feedback

Nice to have

• Experience with payments/billing systems
• DevOps/SRE inclinations, or prior work on multi-tenant self-service platforms.

• Growth & Learning: 40+ internal learning options, external conferences, mentorship, and year-round knowledge-sharing.
• Health & Well-being: Private health insurance, psychotherapy, on-site well-being consultants, 24/7 gym access, and a wellness app.
• Celebration & Community: Team events, an overseas workation, quarterly team-building budgets, and plenty of ways to mark milestones together.
• Plus bonus vacation days, paid life-moment days off, barista coffee, and all the tools you need.