Staff Senior PHP Engineer

At Zendesk, a service-first CRM company, the role involves building powerful, customizable software to improve customer relationships. The company powers billions of conversations with well-known brands and offers a hybrid work model combining onsite and remote work.

• Professional experience building and operating production backend systems with PHP.
• Experience with a modern PHP framework (e.g., Laravel or equivalent).
• Familiarity with testing practices and tools such as PHPUnit and/or Codeception.
• Experience with CI/CD and containerization (e.g., Docker); cloud experience (e.g., AWS) is a plus.
• Solid understanding of relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and data modeling for scalable applications.
• Exposure to event-driven architectures and messaging systems (e.g., Kafka or equivalent) is a plus.
• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (timeouts, retries, idempotency, eventual consistency).
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to problem-solving.
• Curiosity and a continuous-improvement mindset.

Nice to have:

• Swoole, Laravel Octane
• ClickHouse
• Experience building shared libraries/platform components used by multiple teams

• Design, build, review, and maintain backend services and APIs using PHP (Laravel or similar frameworks).
• Contribute to technical design and implementation, balancing reliability, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed.
• Participate in the full SDLC: discovery, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support.
• Improve system performance, resilience, and observability through pragmatic instrumentation and operational best practices.
• Write and maintain automated tests (e.g., PHPUnit/Codeception) and support healthy code review practices.
• Work with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL) to design schemas and data access patterns.
• Collaborate across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to clarify requirements and deliver customer-focused outcomes.
• Help reduce technical debt through refactoring, platform improvements, and strengthening shared patterns and documentation.

• This role requires hybrid work with attendance at the local office part of the week; specific schedule determined by the hiring manager.
• Artificial intelligence or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications.
• Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans upon request.