Senior PHP Software Engineer

Join Zendesk, a company focused on powering exceptional service globally through AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences. The role is part of the Workforce Management product team, which delivers AI-powered solutions for forecasting, scheduling, and agent performance tracking.

• 5+ years professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years building and operating PHP backend systems in production.
• Strong experience with modern PHP frameworks (Laravel preferred) and test frameworks such as PHPUnit/Codeception.
• Skills in designing and implementing RESTful APIs, background job processing, and message-driven workflows.
• Practical experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL): schema design, indexing, query tuning, and migrations.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (timeouts/retries, idempotency, eventual consistency) and scalable design patterns.
• Clear communication and collaboration skills; ability to mentor and grow technical capability.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with Swoole, Laravel Octane, or other PHP performance optimization platforms.
• Exposure to event-driven systems and messaging platforms (Kafka or similar) and analytical stores such as ClickHouse.
• Familiarity with observability and incident tooling (Datadog, Sentry) and defining/using SLOs/SLIs.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, or advanced CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Spinnaker).
• Prior experience building shared libraries or platform components consumed across multiple teams.

• Design, implement, test, and maintain PHP backend services (Laravel or similar) for large-scale, customer-facing features.
• Own end-to-end delivery for features and components including discovery, planning, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Influence system architecture, API design, and data models balancing reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with Product, SRE, QA, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Improve system observability, instrumentation, and operational runbooks; participate in on-call rotations and incident postmortems.
• Drive reduction of technical debt through refactors, platform improvements, and reusable abstractions.
• Mentor and coach colleagues, provide code reviews, and contribute to team best practices and documentation.

This role requires attendance at the local office part of the week as part of a hybrid work model. The specific in-office schedule is determined by the hiring manager.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities.