Senior System Architect

A rapidly growing organization is seeking a high-level Senior System Architect / Senior PHP Developer to guide modernization of a large legacy platform, mentor a young development team, and shape the technical foundation for the company’s next phase of growth—including upcoming AI-driven initiatives.

The organization operates in a collaborative, flat leadership environment where developers work closely with founders and cross-functional leaders. This role requires someone who is opinionated yet pragmatic—someone who can make strong technical decisions, communicate the “why,” and build alignment across teams.

About the Team & Culture

• Highly collaborative development team with open communication, active coaching, and shared ownership.
• Leadership is accessible, non-hierarchical, and moves quickly.
• Strong emphasis on mentorship, humility, servant leadership, and practical innovation.
• Developers work hands-on with product, leadership, and operations teams to support rapid business growth.
• The environment is sales-led and fast-paced, requiring autonomy, accountability, and a balance of innovation business awareness.
• All software development is done internally—no outsourcing—so this role provides direct impact on product direction and quality.

Primary Responsibilities

Architecture & System Design

• Define system architecture patterns, code structure, and engineering standards.
• Lead modernization of a legacy PHP codebase into modular, scalable, and maintainable architecture.
• Collaborate with system leads to document and guide best practices across the platform.
• Understand and balance technical debt, scalability needs, and business-driven priorities.

Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps

• Own AWS architecture, hosting, security, and environment management.
• Manage CI/CD pipelines, deployments, and infrastructure tooling (e.g., Jenkins, Docker).
• Ensure reliability, performance, and efficient deployments across environments.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Act as a mentor for a young development team.
• Provide code guidance, coaching, and architectural reasoning to help engineers grow.
• Transfer knowledge formerly held by the prior architect and maintain continuity of system understanding.
• Support QA teams by sharing context and collaborating on quality improvements.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Communicate technical decisions to non-technical leadership with clarity and rationale.
• Contribute to prioritizing technical debt, stabilization tasks, and roadmap initiatives.
• Work closely with founders, product leadership, and operational teams.
• Help “sell” architectural and modernization strategies internally to ensure alignment.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10 years of experience building large-scale web applications (flexible for exceptional candidates with strong PHP modernization experience).
• Deep experience with PHP, large active codebases, and legacy system modernization.
• Strong full-stack expertise across PHP, SQL, and JavaScript frameworks (Vue preferred).
• Proven AWS experience (hosting, storage, Lambdas, security, automation).
• Solid DevOps background with CI/CD pipelines and containerization (Jenkins, Docker, etc.).
• Strong architectural mindset: understands both the technical and business implications of decisions.
• Comfortable in fast-paced environments with shifting priorities.
• Experience building consensus, justifying technical choices, and aligning teams.
• Passion for mentorship, coaching, and elevating overall team capability.
• Interest in AI-related initiatives and how they impact architecture and product evolution.

Preferred Traits

• Opinionated but pragmatic—able to justify decisions and adapt when needed.
• Excited by system redesign, modernization, and scaling architecture.
• Comfortable working directly with founders and senior leadership.
• Low ego, collaborative, and committed to knowledge sharing.
• Energized by building internal tools with real-world business use cases.
• Open to AI innovation and creatively exploring new technologies.