Job Title: Senior Backend Engineer

Company Name: First Table

Job Url: https://firsttable.bamboohr.com/careers/37?jr_id=69aa8e502ebd316bece24a50

Job Description: About the role

This is a hands-on senior backend role, primarily in PHP, with increasing ownership across cloud platforms for microservices and scalability as we grow.  



If you like solving real problems in production, and owning the outcome, you’ll feel right at home here.



What you’ll be doing

Design, develop, and evolve scalable backend services and APIs (PHP-first). 
Build and maintain integrations with restaurant reservation systems and third-party partners. 
Move workflows toward event-driven architecture, improving reliability and performance. 
Strengthen our AWS platform with infrastructure improvements, automation, and operational excellence (think CI/CD, IaC, containerised workloads). 
Improve observability and resilience (queueing, throttling, retries, debouncing, and production support) when it counts. 
Mentor and uplift the team, contributing to engineering standards and sound technical decisions.


What you’ll bring

5+ years building backend systems for production web applications.  
Strong PHP experience (framework experience helpful, not essential).  
Solid API design + integrations experience.  
Strong SQL + database design (MySQL or equivalent).  
Production experience with AWS, and ideally asynchronous/event-driven systems (SQS/SNS, Kafka, etc.).  
An ownership mindset: you care about quality, reliability, and making things better.