PHP Software Engineer

Software Engineer, Backend

Location: Anywhere in Europe (remote / home-based)

Package: Competitive depending on location (full-time local employment contract)

Our client is a fast-growing cybersecurity product company rethinking how teams manage and share sensitive access. Their platform is trusted by 40,000+ organisations across 50+ countries — and growing fast. This is an engineering-led business: modern architecture, real technical challenges, and a strong focus on open source, privacy, and security. They're building a fully remote, collaborative team and looking for engineers who take ownership and enjoy solving meaningful problems. If you want to work on a product with real impact at global scale — this is worth a conversation.

The Role:

Our client is looking for a software engineer to join its Backend team and help build the systems behind its password and credential management products across Community, Enterprise and Cloud editions.

This is a backend engineering role in a security-sensitive product environment. The API sits at the centre of how our client handles business logic, access rights, integrations, data integrity and long-term product reliability. The role is well-suited to an engineer who enjoys solving complex product problems, building sustainable systems, and balancing security, simplicity and maintainability.

You would contribute across the full development lifecycle: understanding the problem, shaping the technical approach, implementing features, improving the codebase over time, and helping maintain a high standard of quality. This role will suit someone who likes ownership, thinks clearly about impact and trade-offs, and is motivated by building trustworthy software in an open-source environment.

Responsibilities:

• Build and improve backend services and API workflows across product suite
• Translate functional and product requirements into clear, reliable technical solutions
• Work on business logic, access control, integrations and security-sensitive application flows
• Help maintain and improve code quality, test coverage, performance and backward compatibility
• Contribute to technical design discussions and identify opportunities to simplify or strengthen the system over time
• Collaborate with product, support, security and engineering peers to refine and deliver solutions
• Contribute to documentation and knowledge sharing across the team

Core Requirements:

• Experience building backend applications in production with PHP
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals with a modern framework such as CakePHP, Symfony or Laravel
• Ability to break down complex problems and design simple, robust solutions
• Good testing habits and attention to quality
• Comfort working across product, engineering and implementation questions — not just executing tickets
• Strong collaboration skills, openness to feedback, and a low-ego working style
• Interest in security, privacy, or building trustworthy software systems

Nice To Have:

• Experience working on security-sensitive applications or authentication / access-control problems
• Exposure to cryptography-related systems or secure integrations
• Experience with OpenAPI or well-structured public-facing APIs
• Experience maintaining long-lived software products
• Experience with directory integrations or identity systems such as LDAP, Active Directory, OAuth, JWT, SCIM or WebAuthn
• Experience contributing to open-source projects
• Familiarity with another language such as JavaScript, Bash, Python, Go or Rust

Tools and technologies you'll work with: You may work across technologies such as PHP, CakePHP, SQL, PHPUnit, OpenAPI, Git and Docker, in Linux and macOS-based development environments. We do not expect candidates to bring experience with every tool listed here.

How you work:

• You take ownership of problems, not just tasks
• You value simplicity and avoid over-engineering
• You communicate clearly and raise risks early
• You work well in an environment where feedback is frequent and constructive

About Us:

Optima Search is a One-Stop Talent Shop.

As a boutique consultancy, we're a single touchpoint for hiring across Europe and America for early-stage IPOs and world-class brands.

We're working with quality-driven and hand-picked clients and recruit Tech, Sales, Marketing, Services, Operations, Tech and Executives internationally.