Backend Engineer - Laravel, AI-Powered PropTech (Hybrid)

Homesearch; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Share options

25 days holiday plus bank holidays

MacBook provided

On-site gym, yoga and events

Hybrid work: London Victoria office, 2

Regular team events

Job summary

Homesearch is building the intelligence layer to speed up the property market by connecting people, homes and agents through data and AI. We seek a backend developer to extend our Laravel stack, APIs and data services, focusing on security, performance and scalable architecture in a fast-growing PropTech environment.

You will collaborate with product, embrace AI coding tools, and contribute to CI/CD pipelines using AWS, Redis and MySQL.

Qualifications

• Strong PHP and Laravel experience with solid SQL, MySQL preferred, understanding of optimisation and indexing.
• REST/JSON API development experience, comfortable with Redis alongside MySQL.
• AWS experience, particularly API Gateway, ECS and containers, plus Docker and Docker Compose.
• Confident with CI/CD workflows on Bitbucket or GitHub.
• Breadth across different systems (GIS, big data, indexing, ecommerce flows) and ability to explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Active use of AI coding tools (Claude, GitHub Copilot, Codex) while staying accountable for shipped work.
• Collaborative and receptive to code reviews; comfortable with ambiguity in product discussions.
• Ability to explain constraints to non-technical stakeholders; value adaptable career paths.
• Nice-to-have: Vue (V2/V3), Terraform, Agile/Scrum.

Responsibilities

• Work across HAILO, Homesearch Pro and app integrations to tackle high-impact problems.
• Build and extend APIs and backend services in Laravel.
• Improve processing and serving of property data as products scale.
• Set a high bar on security, performance and code quality; lead reviews.
• Shape code structure and CI/CD processes on Bitbucket/GitHub; share packages across the platform.
• Explain technical trade-offs to product/leadership in plain language for early decisions.
• Collaborate with product and participate before specs are fully settled.
• Utilise AI coding tools to speed up development where appropriate.

Skills

Laravel

PHP

REST/JSON API

SQL & MySQL

Caching/optimisation

CI/CD

AWS

Redis

Docker & Compose

AI coding tools

GitHub Copilot & Codex

Frontend basics (Vue/HTML/CSS)

Communication & collaboration

Tools

Docker

Bitbucket/GitHub

API Gateway / ECS

Terraform

Job description

Homesearch is building the intelligence layer to speed up the property market by connecting people, homes and agents through data and AI. We seek a backend developer to extend our Laravel stack, APIs and data services, focusing on security, performance and scalable architecture in a fast-growing PropTech environment.

You will collaborate with product, embrace AI coding tools, and contribute to CI/CD pipelines using AWS, Redis and MySQL.