Senior Software Engineer (Backend, PHP)

About the role

Qualco Group, a fintech organisation with over 25 years of experience serving banks and financial institutions in more than 30 countries, is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Credit Institution (CI) team. The team is building the technology platform of a new, fully digital regulated credit institution, covering digital onboarding, credit decisioning, electronic signing, payments and loan servicing. This is greenfield engineering in a regulated environment, focused on correctness, auditability and clean architecture.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance PHP services, background jobs and REST APIs that orchestrate real financial transactions end to end.
• Write modern PHP (8.2+) with strict types, PSR standards and a hexagonal / DDD architecture around clear bounded contexts.
• Implement distributed workflows using Saga orchestration across identity verification, credit scoring, contract creation, e-signing, disbursement and ledger updates.
• Integrate with third-party providers for KYC, AML screening, qualified electronic signatures, open banking, card acquiring and interbank payments.
• Review pull requests, enforce standards and propose better patterns.
• Own features from design to production, working with product, risk and compliance stakeholders in an agile setup.
• Contribute to architecture, code quality and performance decisions as the platform scales, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Required profile

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong backend expertise.
• Advanced PHP (ideally 8.x): strict types, OOP, design patterns, testing and maintainable architecture.
• Solid grasp of relational databases, including schema design, indexing, query optimisation, transactions and data consistency.
• Proven experience building and maintaining REST APIs with clear contracts, versioning, error handling, security and backwards compatibility.
• Experience with distributed or mission-critical systems where reliability, latency and correctness matter.
• Security-first mindset and familiarity with asynchronous processing, retries, idempotency and eventual consistency.
• Git workflows, CI/CD and code review; ability to lead technical discussions and communicate with engineers and non-engineers.
• Nice to have: fintech, payments or banking background; Kubernetes and observability experience; influence on technical direction.

Required skills

• PHP 8.2+, strict types, PSR standards, Redis
• React
• Microsoft Azure (AKS, Azure SQL, Blob Storage)
• Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, ELK stack
• DDD, API Gateway, Saga orchestration

What we offer

• Competitive compensation, meal vouchers and annual bonus programs.
• IT equipment, mobile phone and data plan.
• Modern facilities, free coffee, indoor parking and in-house restaurant.
• Private health insurance, occupational doctor, workplace counselor and nutritionist.
• Onsite gym, wellness facilities and ping pong room.
• Mentoring, coaching, personalised annual learning and development plan.
• Employee referral bonus, wellbeing, ESG and volunteering activities.