Lead PHP Engineer – EMEA- Fully Remote

Hostaway is a SaaS startup that is transforming the vacation rental industry. With innovative solutions and partnerships with giants like Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking, we’re taking on the competition and winning. Leveraging our customer-centric core values, we consistently deliver results that encourage growth, learning, and innovation for our team, our customers, and the industry.

As a profitable and growing company, this role is necessitated by our continued growth

About the role

Tech Leads within Hostaway are in a pivotal technical leadership role to ensure their cross-functional team builds the right solutions that solve customer problems in a way that is secure, extensible and scalable for the future. Tech Leads are expected to govern the technical maturity for their respective domain, having a clear view of the architectural challenges and how to remediate them over time.

Having a close relationship with the domain’s Product Manager is key. While the PM brings the what, you are their peer responsible for bringing the how. Digging deep into the business problem the PM is trying to solve is key to be able to make the right decisions on how to shape the technical solution for the team to work on.

You are supported by an Engineering Manager who will help guide the day-to-day delivery aspects of the team, ensuring we break work down into tangible small tasks, focus on a sustainable but high-performing delivery cadence, and ensure we have the right candidates in place.

• • 6+ years of experience in software development, with at least 2 years in a leadership role
  • Expert-level proficiency in PHP and related frameworks (PhalconPHP, Symfony or Laravel)
  • Strong understanding of MySQL and database optimization techniques
  • Extensive experience with AWS services and cloud architecture
  • Proven track record of leading and mentoring cross-functional engineering teams
  • Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
  • Strong communication skills, both technical and non-technical
  • Experience with Agile methodologies and CI/CD practices
  • Ability to balance technical debt with delivery of new features in a fast-paced environment
  • Solid understanding of software design patterns and architectural principles
  • Experience with working in SaaS product companies

Nice to have skills for this role:

• Experience with front-end engineering (e.g., ReactJS, NextJS, TailwindUI and similar)
• Knowledge of containerisation technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Familiarity with transitioning to microservices architectures and Domain-Driven Design
• Experience with performance monitoring and optimisation tools
• Understanding of security best practices in web applications
• Experience with scalability challenges in high-growth environments
• Knowledge of machine learning and AI concepts
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)
• The ability to exert Extreme Programming values & techniques to the team

An Average Day for a Tech Lead

• 10:00-10:15 Quick team stand-up, one of your team members seem to be working on a problem you worked on before, and offer to pair with them after the stand-up to support
• 10:30-14:00 Pairing with one of your team members to work on a complex scalability issue together and grabbing a quick bite to re-fuel those pesky braincells in-between coding sessions!
• 14:00-15:00 Doing a design session with the Product Manager and UX designer for a large upcoming feature that the team should pick up next week. You ask a lot of questions to drill down to the problem we are trying to solve, and suggest some easier solutions that require less effort for the team.
• 15:00-16:00 The design session triggered some thoughts about other areas of the system that will be affected. You’re doing a quick dive in the affected areas of the code and find some technical debt that might affect the system’s scalability or reliability. You create a brief Jira ticket and tag the Product Manager to help get it prioritised and to ensure it is not forgotten. You also ping the ticket to one of the other domains’ tech leads, as you recall them mentioning a similar problem existing in another domain team.
• 16:00-16:30 Quick catch-up with the Engineering Manager on the teams delivery reliability and how you can help keep Work in Progress (WIP) and Pull Request (PR) review time to a minimum
• 16:30-18:00 Talking about PR’s, there are actually still a few open. You take the last part of the day to review your teams PRs. There are some great solutions offered, but one of the junior engineers introduced some code that is difficult to maintain and is lacking unit tests. You jump on a quick call with them to explain the issues and why it matters.