PHP Backend Engineer: Scale & Cloud-Native Performance

Ocho People Ltd.; Belfast City District; On-site; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

Ocho People Ltd. in Belfast is seeking a Software Engineer to join a fast-growing startup and help shape a cloud-based platform. You will design, build and optimise backend services with PHP, aiming for high performance and reliability.

You will collaborate with product and engineering teams to deliver robust PHP solutions, scale the platform, and influence infrastructure decisions. The role emphasizes ownership, DevOps practices and a cloud-native approach in a high-growth environment.

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience in PHP.
• Understanding of performance optimisation and scalable architecture.
• Experience in cloud environments (AWS, Azure or GCP).
• Familiarity with containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes).

Responsibilities

• Designing and developing high-quality backend services using PHP.
• Improving application performance, response times and scalability.
• Working within a cloud-native environment (AWS, Azure or GCP).
• Contributing to architectural decisions around infrastructure and deployment.
• Writing clean, testable and maintainable code.
• Identifying bottlenecks and implementing optimisation strategies.
• Supporting CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.

Skills

PHP

Performance optimisation

Distributed systems

API design

Databases

Cloud environments

CI/CD / DevOps

Start-up mindset

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Ocho People Ltd. in Belfast is seeking a Software Engineer to join a fast-growing startup and help shape a cloud-based platform. You will design, build and optimise backend services with PHP, aiming for high performance and reliability.

You will collaborate with product and engineering teams to deliver robust PHP solutions, scale the platform, and influence infrastructure decisions. The role emphasizes ownership, DevOps practices and a cloud-native approach in a high-growth environment.