Principal Staff Engineer

Scion Technology Staffing; Calabasas (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Comprehensive benefits package

High-visibility ownership and autonomy

Job summary

Scion Staffing has been engaged to identify a Principal Staff Engineer (PHP / Web Platform) for a global leader in make-on-demand ecommerce. This is a hands-on, coding-first role with ~80% PHP development and ~20% AWS/production operations, focusing on a high-traffic web platform's reliability and scalability.

The ideal candidate has 5-7+ years of PHP experience, strong Laravel/Symfony skills, and proven ability to troubleshoot live production issues while collaborating with offshore teams.

Qualifications

• 5-7+ years of professional PHP development experience, with PHP keeping a significant focus in recent work.
• Strong hands-on experience with Laravel and/or Symfony frameworks.
• Hands-on experience supporting applications and servers in AWS.
• Experience troubleshooting live production issues and outages.
• Ability to work across application code and supporting infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain production applications using PHP, Laravel/Symfony, MySQL, Linux, and the LAMP stack.
• Build new features, review code, and contribute to technical design and architecture.
• Support and troubleshoot AWS-hosted production environments (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch).
• Investigate outages, performance degradation, server issues, and application errors.
• Monitor health and reliability, improving uptime for high-traffic platforms.
• Collaborate with offshore teams on development, reviews, releases, and problem-solving.
• Participate in deployments, root-cause analysis, and ongoing reliability improvements.

Skills

PHP development

Laravel/Symfony

Production issue troubleshooting

Performance optimization

MySQL database troubleshooting

Distributed/global teams

Tools

AWS

Job description

Scion Technology has been engaged to conduct a search for an experienced Principal Staff Engineer (PHP / Web Platform) for our client, a global leader in make-on-demand ecommerce.

THE OPPORTUNITY:

We are looking for a highly hands-on PHP Engineer to help build, maintain, and support a high-traffic global web platform. This is a coding-first role - approximately 80% hands-on PHP development and 20% AWS / production operations. You'll spend the majority of your time building and improving PHP applications while also serving as a senior technical resource when production issues arise.

PERKS:

• Work on a high-traffic global web platform supporting multiple consumer brands
• Stay highly hands-on while having meaningful technical ownership and influence
• Own problems across both application development and production operations
• Join an environment where experienced engineers have autonomy and visibility across the platform

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design, develop, and maintain production applications using PHP, Laravel/Symfony, MySQL, Linux, and the LAMP stack
• Build new features, improve existing applications, review code, and contribute to technical design and architecture
• Support and troubleshoot AWS-hosted production environments, including EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and related services
• Investigate website outages, performance degradation, server issues, application errors, and other production incidents
• Monitor application and infrastructure health and help maintain strong uptime and reliability
• Troubleshoot performance across PHP applications, MySQL databases, caching, servers, APIs, and infrastructure
• Help protect customer-facing websites from security threats, abnormal traffic, and attacks
• Improve application performance and scalability for high-traffic web environments
• Participate in deployments, root-cause analysis, monitoring, and ongoing reliability improvements
• Collaborate with a China-based engineering team on development, code reviews, releases, and technical problem-solving

QUALIFICATIONS:

• 5-7+ years of professional PHP development experience, with PHP remaining a significant part of your current/recent work
• Strong hands-on experience with Laravel and/or Symfony
• Hands-on experience supporting applications and servers in AWS
• Experience troubleshooting live production issues and website outages
• Ability to work across both application code and the infrastructure supporting it
• Experience with monitoring, performance optimization, scalability, and web security
• Strong MySQL/database troubleshooting and optimization skills
• Comfortable working independently and taking ownership when production issues arise
• Experience collaborating with offshore or globally distributed engineering teams

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS:

• This direct-hire position offers a base salary of $130,000-$195,000 annually, commensurate with experience, along with a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, and additional benefits.

ABOUT OUR FIRM:

Scion Staffing is a national award-winning staffing firm! Since 2006, we have had the pleasure of successfully placing thousands of talented professionals with amazing career opportunities. Through our innovative team building and recruiting solutions, we bridge the gap in executive leadership searches, direct hire recruiting, interim leadership placement, and temporary professional staffing. We are proud to be part of the Forbes lists of the Best Recruitment Firms and the Best Executive Search Firms in America. Additionally, Scion has been recognized as a ClearlyRated Best of Staffing firm as well as a top recruitment firm by The Business Times. Additional information about our firm can also be found online.

Scion Staffing, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and service provider and does not discriminate based on race, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, sexual orientation, disability, political affiliation or belief, or any other protected class. We are committed to the principles of Equal Opportunity Employment and are dedicated to making employment decisions based on merit and value, for ourselves, our client companies, and the candidates we represent. For opportunities located in a region that have enacted fair chance, arrest or conviction-based employment ordinances, Scion Staffing proactively follows the enacted guidance and considers for employment all qualified applications with arrest and conviction records. We engage in socially conscious business practices and believe that diverse, inclusive, and non-biased talent and recruitment processes are foundational to the success of Scion as well as every client organization with whom we partner.