PHP Team Lead

SME Careers; United States; Remote; USD 55,000 - 117,000; Full time

Job summary

SME Careers is hiring a PHP Quality Assurance Lead (QAL) for an hourly, remote contractor role. You will oversee quality across PHP AI training projects and review AI-generated PHP code and trainer work to ensure adherence to guidelines.

You will assess code correctness, runtime behavior, security, performance, and rubric adherence while managing QA workflows across remote teams. Strong PHP expertise and English communication are essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or equivalent experience.
• Strong English to follow guidelines and provide clear feedback.
• 3+ years of professional PHP development, backend QA, or code review workflows.
• Solid knowledge of PHP 8+, OOP, namespaces, autoloading, REST APIs, and databases.
• Experience leading or supporting remote teams of trainers, QAs, or engineers.

Responsibilities

• Spot-check PHP items and provide ongoing feedback through DMs.
• Review AI-generated PHP code, backend snippets, debugging responses, API examples, database logic, and tests.
• Update trainers/QAs on Discord about guideline changes and PHP-specific quality standards.
• Answer questions around PHP syntax, frameworks, runtime behavior, security, testing, and rubric interpretation.
• Activate inactive contributors through DMs and follow-up tracking.
• Create and maintain PHP documentation, style guides, examples, trackers, FAQs, honeypots, and onboarding materials.
• Run onboarding/training calls for PHP trainers and QAs.
• Flag insecure, outdated, misleading, or non-production-ready PHP recommendations.
• Identify recurring quality gaps and improve QA processes.

Skills

PHP development

Code review

QA processes

Remote team leadership

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science or related

Tools

Laravel

Symfony

PHPUnit

Pest

MySQL/PostgreSQL

Redis

Docker

GitHub

CI/CD

PSR standards

Job description

In this hourly, remote contractor role, you will work as a PHP Quality Assurance Lead (QAL) to oversee quality, consistency, and trainer performance across PHP AI training projects. You will review AI-generated PHP code and trainer/QA work, evaluate output quality against project guidelines, provide precise written feedback, and ensure contributors follow expected quality standards.

You will assess work for code correctness, runtime behavior, framework awareness, debugging accuracy, readability, maintainability, performance, security, test coverage, formatting, instruction-following, and rubric adherence. This role requires strong PHP expertise, English communication skills, attention to detail, and the ability to manage quality workflows across remote technical teams.

This role is with SME Careers, a fast-growing AI Data Services company and subsidiary of SuperAnnotate, delivering training data for many of the world’s largest AI companies and foundation-model labs. Your PHP quality leadership will help ensure PHP training data is accurate, executable, secure, clearly explained, and aligned with client expectations.

Selection process involves an AI interview, a domain-specific task, and an interview with a recruiter.

Important:
There is no immediate project for this role; however, if qualified, you will be among the first experts we reach out to when relevant opportunities arise. This will also provide you with access to future projects available through our expert network.

Responsibilities

• Spot-check PHP items and provide ongoing feedback through DMs.
• Review AI-generated PHP code, backend snippets, debugging responses, API examples, database logic, and tests.
• Update trainers/QAs on Discord about guideline changes and PHP-specific quality standards.
• Answer questions around PHP syntax, frameworks, runtime behavior, security, testing, and rubric interpretation.
• Activate inactive contributors through DMs and follow-up tracking.
• Create and maintain PHP documentation, style guides, examples, trackers, FAQs, honeypots, and onboarding materials.
• Run onboarding/training calls for PHP trainers and QAs.
• Flag insecure, outdated, misleading, or non-production-ready PHP recommendations.
• Identify recurring quality gaps and improve QA processes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT, or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong grasp of English to follow guidelines and provide clear technical feedback.
• 3+ years of professional PHP development, backend engineering, code review, QA, mentoring, or related workflows.
• Strong understanding of PHP 8+, OOP, namespaces, Composer, autoloading, arrays, exceptions, type declarations, sessions, HTTP, REST APIs, database access, and error handling.
• Ability to evaluate PHP content and identify issues such as non-executable code, insecure SQL handling, weak validation, flawed logic, outdated syntax, hallucinated APIs, or incomplete explanations.
• Familiarity with Laravel, Symfony, PHPUnit, Pest, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, GitHub, CI/CD, static analysis tools, and PSR standards is preferred.
• Experience leading or supporting remote teams of trainers, annotators, reviewers, engineers, or QAs is strongly preferred.
• Comfortable with Discord, Google Sheets, Google Docs, trackers, dashboards, GitHub, and PM systems.
• Highly organized and able to maintain documentation, style guides, trackers, FAQs, calibration tasks, and honeypots.
• Experience with AI training, LLM evaluation, code QA, or rubric-based review is a strong plus.