Senior Software Engineer

Job Description

Vultr is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and scale the backend systems powering Vultr's cloud platform.

The ideal candidate is a seasoned engineer with deep expertise in PHP and MySQL, strong experience with modern API design, and a passion for building resilient, high-availability systems at scale.

This is a highly visible role in a high-growth technology company, which will require a blend of backend mastery, database optimization skills, and collaborative engineering practices.

This is your opportunity to join our fast growing team and leave your mark on Vultr and the future of Cloud Infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance PHP applications serving millions of API requests daily

• Architect and optimize MySQL database schemas, queries, and indexing strategies for low-latency access

• Implement and maintain RESTful APIs following modern API design standards, including OpenAPI specifications and versioning best practices

• Design and implement asynchronous workflows, background jobs, queues, and event-driven integrations where appropriate

• Participate in architecture discussions, incident response, and root-cause analysis for production issues

• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to define technical requirements and deliver scalable solutions

• Conduct code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and champion engineering best practices

• Write clean, well-tested code with comprehensive unit and integration test coverage

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience with strong proficiency in modern PHP (PHP 8+) and common frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, or Slim

• Deep expertise in MySQL including query optimization and schema design for high-traffic applications

• Strong experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs using modern standards

• Experience with Redis for caching, distributed locking, queues, and performance optimization

• Familiarity with message queues and asynchronous processing systems such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, or Redis Streams

• Proficiency with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes

• Experience with logging, monitoring, tracing, and observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.)

• Understanding of API security best practices including OAuth2, JWT, RBAC, rate limiting, and OWASP principles

• Experience with cloud infrastructure platforms (Vultr, AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tooling

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and Git-based development workflows

• Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across distributed teams