Senior Backend Engineer (PHP/Laravel)

Shakers; Italia; Remote; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Shakers is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (PHP/Laravel) to join the Integrations at scale team for a freelance project, remote and full-time. The platform processes tens of millions of shipments every month and integrates with hundreds of carriers and major e-commerce platforms.

You will design scalable backend services in PHP/Laravel, build carrier and platform integrations, and drive the evolution of distributed microservices on AWS.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field.
• Strong system design skills, clean architecture and a clear grasp of engineering trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with microservices, asynchronous patterns and distributed systems.
• Track record designing and operating reliable, production-grade services.
• Ownership of technical decisions and the ability to explain the reasoning behind them.
• Fluent written and spoken English (C1): the engineering team works in English.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop scalable backend services, mainly in PHP and Laravel.
• Build and maintain integrations with carriers, e-commerce platforms and third-party services.
• Drive the evolution of the microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Lead the technical design of solutions and raise engineering standards in the team.
• Weigh architectural trade-offs across scalability, reliability, performance and maintainability.
• Integrate AI and LLM capabilities to automate complex workflows.
• Improve performance and reliability at high transaction volumes.
• Mentor two mid-level engineers alongside the Team Lead.
• Collaborate with Product, Design and Support from discovery to release.

Skills

PHP

Laravel

Microservices

Distributed systems

System design

Async patterns

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field

Tools

PHP

Laravel

Job description

Senior Backend Engineer (PHP/Laravel) · Integrations at scale in a shipping SaaS

At Shakers we’re partnering with a fast-growing Italian SaaS scale-up in e-commerce logistics to bring in a Senior Backend Engineer who thinks at system level and becomes the senior technical reference of their Integration team. Freelance project, remote, full time, with real ownership over a platform processing tens of millions of shipments every month.

The challenge

The platform automates the entire shipping process for e-commerce merchants: carrier selection, labels, tracking, notifications and cost control, integrated with hundreds of carriers and the main e-commerce platforms. Over the last two years engineering has moved from a large monolith to microservices on AWS, organised in domain teams with end-to-end ownership.

The Integration team owns carrier and third-party integrations: asynchronous workflows, distributed systems, external APIs and plenty of tricky edge cases. This is not a ticket-execution or bug-fixing role. We’re looking for someone who anticipates needs, makes sound architectural calls and owns what goes to production.

Responsibilities

Design and develop scalable backend services, mainly in PHP and Laravel.

Build and maintain integrations with carriers, e-commerce platforms and third-party services.

Drive the evolution of the microservices architecture and distributed systems.

Lead the technical design of solutions and raise engineering standards in the team.

Weigh architectural trade-offs across scalability, reliability, performance and maintainability.

Integrate AI and LLM capabilities to automate complex workflows.

Improve performance and reliability at high transaction volumes.

Mentor two mid-level engineers alongside the Team Lead.

Collaborate with Product, Design and Support from discovery to release.

Requirements

5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.

Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field.

Strong system design skills, clean architecture and a clear grasp of engineering trade-offs.

Hands-on experience with microservices, asynchronous patterns and distributed systems.

Track record designing and operating reliable, production-grade services.

Ownership of technical decisions and the ability to explain the reasoning behind them.

Fluent written and spoken English (C1): the engineering team works in English.

Nice to have

Hands-on PHP and Laravel (strong backend experience with comparable stacks also considered).

SaaS or high-volume platforms, and third-party integrations / external APIs.

Integrating AI/ML or LLM capabilities into products.

Full-stack exposure to support React when needed.

Background in e-commerce, logistics, shipping or carrier integrations.

Why this project?

Remote, with occasional team meetups at HQ in Italy.

Real scale: millions of API calls and shipments every month.

Architecture work, not just implementation, in an autonomous cross-functional team.

AI-enabled engineering, both in how you build and what you build.

Long-term collaboration, with a possible move to a permanent role.