Senior Backend Engineer

About Airalo
Alo! Airalo is the world’s first eSIM store that helps people connect in over 200+ countries and regions across the globe. We are building the next digital service that revolutionizes the telecom industry. We are a travel-tech company and an equal-opportunity environment that values and executes diversity, inclusion, and equity. Our team is spread across 50+ countries and six continents. What glues us together is our commitment to changing the way you connect.
Check out more information about Airalo in our Public Handbook: https://airalo-public.notion.site/airalo-public-handbook
About you
We hope that you care deeply about the quality of your work, the intrinsic worth of tasks, and the success of your team. You are self-disciplined and do not require micromanagement in terms of your skillset and work ethic. You do your best to flourish as an individual every day while working hard to foster a collaborative team environment. You believe in the importance of being — and staying — authentic, honest, positive, and kind. You are a good interlocutor with clear and concise communication. You are able to manage multiple projects, have an analytical mind, pay keen attention to detail, and love to get your hands dirty. You are cognizant, tolerant, and welcoming of vulnerabilities and cultural differences.
About the Role
Position: Full-time / Employee
Location: Remote-first
Benefits: Health Insurance, work-from-anywhere stipend, annual wellness & learning credits, annual all-expenses-paid company retreat in a gorgeous destination & other benefits
On-Call:
Participating in our on-call rotation is a core expectation of this role. It's essential for maintaining 24/7 service reliability across our global operations, ensuring our systems remain resilient and our customers experience uninterrupted service, regardless of time zone or geography.
- Paid Rotation: We offer standby fees + overtime pay.
- Delayed Start: No on-call duties for your first 6 months.
- Rest & Recovery: Guaranteed rest periods and flexible hours following night incidents.
- Shared Load: Rotations are split (Weekdays vs. Weekends) to minimize fatigue.
Please refer to the On-Call Policy in the Airalo Handbook for full details: https://airalo-public.notion.site/our-approach-to-engineering-on-call-policy 
Are you a seasoned engineer who thrives on solving complex architectural puzzles in PHP? Join our team as a Senior Backend Engineer where you will lead the evolution of our global platform with more then 20 million users. We value deep technical mastery, a mentor mindset, and the ability to balance rapid innovation with system stability. While we use Laravel, we highly value the architectural rigor of seasoned Symfony experts ready to pick up Laravel and apply their skills to our ecosystem.

Your main responsibilities will be to:

• Lead the design of high-performance distributed systems capable of handling global traffic
• Develop and refine services to improve scalability and efficiency
• Drive the transition toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to ensure modularity and resilience
• Set the bar for code quality by enforcing SOLID principles, design patterns, and testing standards
• Actively coach mid-level engineers through deep code reviews and technical knowledge sharing
• Identify bottlenecks in services and implement advanced caching and database strategies
• Partner with Product and DevOps to translate complex requirements into scalable technical roadmaps

Does this sound like you:

• 7+ years of professional backend development experience with a deep mastery of PHP
• 4+ years of building enterprise-grade applications in Laravel or an equivalent senior background in Symfony
• Mastery of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and messaging patterns like SQS or Pub/Sub
• Knowledge of SQL and NoSQL including performance tuning and handling transactions at scale
• Experience architecting on AWS and managing containerized environments with Docker
• A champion of clean code, automated testing, and CI/CD best practices
• Fluent English with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to stakeholders

Bonus:

• Experience with SaaS/PaaS, SOA, or microservices architecture.
• Experience with eSIM, or GSMA technologies.
• Familiarity with Traveltech solutions.
• Experience in building or maintaining custom SDKs would be a plus