Laravel Developer - We're Looking for a Unicorn

Not the mythical “knows every framework ever created” kind. We’re looking for a Laravel developer who genuinely understands the ecosystem, knows what happens beyond the controller, and isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty when things become complicated.

This is a primarily backend-focused role, but we work heavily with the TALL stack - Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Laravel and Livewire - so being comfortable moving across the stack is a major advantage.

You’ll help build, expand and maintain our gaming, network, marketing and CRM platforms. These are interconnected systems with real users, real transactions, high-frequency queues, real-time events, external integrations and plenty of business logic.

In other words: this isn’t a CRUD factory.

Our Stack

Laravel sits at the heart of what we build, but the interesting part is everything happening around it.

Application

• Laravel / modern PHP
• Livewire
• Alpine.js
• Tailwind CSS
• Laravel Nova
• MySQL
• REST APIs and external integrations

Architecture

• Redis
• High-frequency and high-volume queues
• Workers and asynchronous processing
• Jobs, events and event-driven workflows
• WebSockets and real-time applications
• Multiple interconnected applications, APIs and services

Infrastructure

• Laravel Cloud
• DigitalOcean App Platform
• AWS
• Cloudflare
• Cloud servers and distributed workers

You won’t be isolated inside a controller and a Blade template.

You’ll get exposure to the full journey from request to database, queue, Redis, worker, WebSocket, external services, infrastructure and production monitoring.

How We Build

We like good tooling, automation and anything that lets engineers spend more time solving interesting problems and less time doing repetitive work.

Our engineering workflow includes:

• GitHub Actions for CI/CD and automated checks
• CodeRabbit for AI-assisted pull request reviews
• SonarQube for code quality and maintainability
• PHPStan and static analysis to catch problems before they reach production
• Sentry / Laravel Nightwatch for application monitoring and debugging
• Cloudflare across our edge and security infrastructure
• AI-powered development workflows integrated directly into Slack

AI is already part of how we work.

We don’t have an AI strategy deck gathering dust somewhere. We actually use it.

We’re not looking for developers who replace their thinking with AI. We want people who know how to use it as another engineering tool to move faster, investigate deeper and ship better software.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain Laravel features across several interconnected applications.
• Design and implement functionality for our CRM, gaming, network and marketing platforms.
• Work with complex business logic involving multiple models, services, jobs, events and integrations.
• Design and maintain APIs used by our own applications and external systems.
• Work with high-frequency queues, asynchronous jobs, caching and Redis.
• Build and maintain real-time functionality using events and WebSockets.
• Investigate production issues, regressions and unexpected behaviour across the application and infrastructure.
• Think about performance, scalability and how changes behave when traffic or workload increases.
• Occasionally go beyond the application layer when something needs investigating across workers, Redis, queues, servers or infrastructure.
• Understand existing architecture before introducing changes.
• Write clean, maintainable code that fits naturally into the wider platform.
• Participate in two-week sprints within a horizontal development team.
• Work through our review process: automated checks, AI-assisted review, colleague review and final validation with QA.
• Collaborate closely with developers, QA and product rather than relying only on the initial task description.

The Unicorn We’re Looking For

You take ownership of a feature from the moment you start understanding the requirement until it is running correctly in production.

You don’t consider a task finished simply because the happy path works.

You think about edge cases, existing behaviour, related models, background jobs, integrations and what might break somewhere else as a result of your change.

You’re comfortable digging until you understand why.

You communicate early, challenge assumptions when something doesn’t make sense and ask questions instead of blindly implementing the initial ticket description.

You want to understand why something is being built, not simply what code needs to be written.

Most importantly, you enjoy understanding systems - not just writing code inside them.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong professional experience with Laravel and modern PHP
• Strong understanding of Laravel architecture and common framework patterns
• Excellent understanding of Eloquent, relational databases and SQL
• Experience designing and maintaining APIs and complex backend systems
• Strong understanding of queues, jobs, events, caching and Redis
• Experience with asynchronous and event-driven application architecture
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar codebases and reason about existing behaviour before changing it
• Good understanding of application performance and scalability
• Ability to diagnose technical issues independently
• Clear communication and a strong sense of ownership
• Comfortable working within an iterative development, review and QA process

Nice to Have

• Strong experience with the complete TALL stack
• Experience building applications with Livewire, Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS
• Experience with Laravel Nova
• Experience with Vue.js or Nuxt
• Experience with WebSockets and real-time systems
• Experience operating high-volume queues and workers
• Experience with Laravel Cloud, DigitalOcean or AWS
• Experience with observability and production debugging
• Experience with gaming, CRM, marketing, fintech or other complex transactional platforms
• Experience working with systems where performance, reliability and data consistency actually matter

We like hiring processes the same way we like our code: clear, efficient and without unnecessary layers.

Our process is simple:

1. HR introduction

A first conversation to get to know each other, understand your background and make sure there’s a good overall fit.

1. Technical test

A practical exercise designed to see how you think, structure your code and approach real Laravel problems. No algorithm gymnastics for the sake of it.

1. Team call

Meet the people you’d actually be working with, talk through the technical test, discuss the stack and architecture, and make sure the fit works both ways.

That’s it.

No seven-round interview marathon. No surprise whiteboard ambush. No quest to retrieve three references from a former manager’s manager.

We want enough signal to know we’ve found the right unicorn - without making you complete an epic side quest to join us.

Remuneration

Great engineers should be paid like great engineers.

We don’t believe in forcing every developer into the same salary bracket regardless of what they bring to the table.

Remuneration is aligned with your actual level, experience and technical impact.

If you bring deep Laravel knowledge, strong architectural thinking, production experience and the ability to solve the problems others avoid, we’re prepared to recognise that accordingly.

In short:

The stronger the unicorn, the better the package.

We’re looking for someone we can trust with important systems, and we believe compensation should reflect that level of trust and responsibility.

One Last Thing

We’re not looking for someone who wants to spend their days moving buttons three pixels to the left.

We’re looking for someone who genuinely enjoys Laravel, likes solving difficult problems, wants to understand the architecture behind the product and is perfectly happy rolling up their sleeves when the answer isn’t immediately obvious.

If you like clean code, messy problems, Redis, queues, real-time systems, AI tooling and occasionally wondering why a worker has suddenly developed a personality of its own…