Staff Senior PHP Engineer

Job Description At Zendesk, we’re a service-first CRM company building powerful, customizable software that helps teams improve customer relationships. We’re growing our engineering presence and are looking for a Staff/Senior PHP Backend Software Engineer to join us. In this role, you’ll design, build, and operate reliable backend services in a large-scale environment. You’ll work with PHP and modern backend tooling, contribute across the full SDLC, and collaborate closely with engineering and cross-functional partners to deliver maintainable solutions with strong performance and observability. Experience with frameworks like Laravel, containerization, cloud infrastructure, and event-driven systems is a plus. What you’ll be doing Design, build, review, and maintain backend services and APIs using PHP (Laravel or similar frameworks). Contribute to technical design and implementation, balancing reliability, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed. Participate in the full SDLC: discovery, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support. Improve system performance, resilience, and observability through pragmatic instrumentation and operational best practices. Write and maintain automated tests (e.g., PHPUnit/Codeception) and support healthy code review practices. Work with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL) to design schemas and data access patterns. Collaborate across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to clarify requirements and deliver customer-focused outcomes. Help reduce technical debt through refactoring, platform improvements, and strengthening shared patterns and documentation. What you bring to the team Professional experience building and operating production backend systems with PHP. Experience with a modern PHP framework (e.g., Laravel or equivalent). Familiarity with testing practices and tools such as PHPUnit and/or Codeception. Experience with CI/CD and containerization (e.g., Docker); cloud experience (e.g., AWS) is a plus. Solid understanding of relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and data modeling for scalable applications. Exposure to event-driven architectures and messaging systems (e.g., Kafka or equivalent) is a plus. Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (timeouts, retries, idempotency, eventual consistency). Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to problem-solving. Curiosity and a continuous-improvement mindset. Nice to have Swoole, Laravel Octane ClickHouse Experience building shared libraries/platform components used by multiple teams What you can expect Challenging technical problems with room to learn and grow. Collaboration with supportive, skilled teammates. Flexibility to structure your workday in a sustainable way. Competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package. If you’re excited about building reliable backend systems in PHP and want to help teams serve their customers better, we’d love to hear from you. The Poland annualized base salary range for this position is zł304,000.00-zł456,000.00. Please note that while the salary range represents the minimum and maximum base salary rate for this position, the actual compensation offered will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other relevant factors. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives that will be communicated during the offer stage. Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager. The intelligent heart of customer experience Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. To ... (truncated, view full listing at source)