PHP Engineer | Daily Rate Contract

JS Careers; Sydney; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

JS Careers is partnering with a leading global financial services group to hire a hands-on PHP engineer in Sydney. The role blends technical leadership with shaping architecture while continuing to write production code on an evolving platform.

You'll drive end-to-end technical leadership for PHP-based cloud applications, mentor junior engineers, and influence platform direction through architecture decisions and AI-assisted delivery practices.

Qualifications

• Extensive PHP experience for cloud-based apps.
• Proven ability to design decoupled, scalable systems.
• Experience with microservices and service-oriented architectures.
• Familiarity with AWS and cloud-native development.

Responsibilities

• Providing end-to-end technical leadership across PHP-based cloud applications.
• Leading design decisions through POCs and high-performance, critical code components.
• Mentoring and leading junior engineers, uplifting technical capability across the team.
• AI-assisted software engineering and embedding AI-enabled practices into day-to-day delivery.
• Collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and QA engineers.

Skills

PHP engineering

Technical leadership

Architectural design

AI-assisted engineering

Cloud architecture

Tools

AWS

MySQL

CloudWatch

Dynatrace

Claude Code

Copilot

Gemini CLI

Job description

JS Careers is partnering with a leading global financial services group for a hands-on PHP engineering role.This role is responsible for shaping architecture, delivery, and technical leadership while continuing to write production code across an evolving platform.

The ideal candidate has strong PHP engineering credentials and is looking to step into a role that blends technical leadership with influence over platform direction.

The role:

You'll balance technical contribution with architectural leadership on a business-critical platform, acting as a senior engineering voice across complex, cross-functional initiatives as the team drives the next evolution of the platform.

You'll be responsible for:

• Providing end-to-end technical leadership across PHP-based cloud applications.
• Leading design decisions through POCs and high-performance, critical code components.
• Mentoring and leading junior engineers, uplifting technical capability across the team.
• AI-assisted software engineering and embedding AI-enabled practices into day-to-day delivery.
• Collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and QA engineers.

What we're looking for:

• Strong depth of experience building PHP-based applications for the cloud.
• Solid understanding of performant, resilient, decoupled software systems with high standards of code maintainability.
• Proven experience using AI-assisted engineering tools such as Claude Code, Copilot or Gemini CLI.
• Experience designing and evolving service-oriented and microservices architectures.
• Advanced knowledge of database optimisation, indexing, and query performance tuning for MySQL.
• Proven AWS experience (e.g. S3, SQS, SNS, Cognito) and familiarity with cloud-native application development.
• Knowledge of monitoring and observability tools (e.g. AWS CloudWatch, Dynatrace).
• Good understanding of cybersecurity principles, security standards and compliance frameworks (e.g. ISO 27001) is highly regarded.
• Knowledge of secure coding practices is highly regarded (Secure Code Warrior experience a bonus).