Backend Developer

About This Role

This high-ownership role leads the backend team and owns the technical direction of the company's project platform. The Backend Developer balances hands-on development with team leadership, designing scalable backend services, guiding architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and driving delivery across sales, inventory, payments, loyalty, and reporting modules. The role involves maintaining the current Laravel, PHP, and MySQL stack while leading a pragmatic migration toward a more modern, service-oriented backend (TypeScript/NestJS or equivalent) without disrupting live merchant operations.

Responsibilities

• Own backend architecture for the platform: API design, service boundaries, data models, and integration patterns
• Define and enforce engineering standards: code review practices, testing strategy, CI/CD, documentation, and release discipline
• Lead technical planning and estimation with product and engineering leadership
• Mentor backend engineers through code reviews, pairing, and career growth
• Design and develop scalable backend systems for the product based on POS operations across retail, restaurants, and multi-location merchants
• Build and maintain secure, high-performance RESTful APIs for web, mobile, and in-store clients
• Own modules for sales transactions, inventory, customer management, loyalty, and reporting data feeds
• Integrate payment gateways, POS hardware services, and third-party business systems
• Optimize MySQL (and future PostgreSQL) for high-volume transactional workloads and reporting use cases
• Implement authentication, authorization, and multi-tenant data isolation best practices
• Support multi-store and multi-location of POS operations with reliability and performance at scale
• Lead incremental migration from Laravel monolith to modern service architecture (e.g., NestJS/TypeScript services)
• Define API contracts and integration boundaries between legacy and new services
• Identify high-risk areas (payments, inventory sync, reporting) and prioritize safe migration paths
• Troubleshoot production issues and drive root-cause fixes, not just patches
• Partner with DevOps on deployment, monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Ensure high system availability, performance, and scalability as merchant volume grows

Requirements

• Experience leading backend teams (3-8 engineers) or being the senior technical owner in a small, fast-moving product team
• Ability to thrive in a high-growth startup: ambiguous requirements, shifting priorities, and the need to ship while building scale
• Hands-on approach: still writes code, reviews PRs, and debugs production issues
• Clear communication with product managers, non-technical stakeholders, and junior engineers