Senior Backend Developer

About the role

We are looking for a hands‑on Senior Backend Developer to own and evolve the core backend services of First Table’s reservation platform. You will work on PHP‑based APIs, cloud‑native micro‑services and integrations that power restaurant bookings across New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain scalable backend services and APIs, primarily using PHP.
• Build and support integrations with restaurant reservation systems and third‑party partners.
• Transition workflows to an event‑driven architecture to improve reliability and performance.
• Enhance the AWS platform through infrastructure improvements, automation, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code and containerised workloads.
• Increase observability and resilience with queueing, throttling, retries, debouncing and production support.
• Mentor team members and contribute to engineering standards and technical decisions.

Required profile

• 5+ years of experience building backend systems for production web applications.
• Strong expertise in PHP development.
• Proven experience designing APIs and integrating external services.
• Hands‑on experience with AWS, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code and container technologies.
• Familiarity with event‑driven architectures and production support practices.

Required skills

• PHP
• AWS
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure as Code
• Docker (or other container platforms)
• Microservices
• Event‑driven architecture
• API design and integration
• Queueing and resiliency patterns
• Monitoring and observability tools