Senior Backend Engineer

Element451 · Engineering

Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students — and the backend is the engine that makes it work. You'll build the services, data models, and integrations that move millions of student interactions through a multi-tenant, async-first platform, with AI woven into the product itself. It's a rare chance to own meaningful systems end to end, treat AI as a real craft rather than a buzzword, and help shape how a high-performing team builds software in the AI era. If you want your work to matter, your judgment to carry real weight, and your skills to keep growing alongside people who care deeply about the craft, you'll feel at home here.

The Role

You'll build high-quality backend software with full end-to-end ownership — from shaping a feature in planning through keeping it stable in production. This is an explicitly AI-forward role: AI tooling is a professional discipline here, applied thoughtfully across every phase of the work, not a shortcut for generating code. Senior Engineers operate with a lot of autonomy, hold their work to a high standard, and lift the quality of the work happening around them.

We hold a high bar — and we give you the ownership, context, and support to meet it. We're upfront about expectations because the engineers who thrive here tend to want exactly that kind of environment.

What You'll Own

You own the services you ship — their correctness, stability, security, and maintainability — from the first design conversation until they're live and working well for real users. We consider a feature delivered when it has been validated before release, rolled out safely, and shown through production monitoring to meet its correctness, performance, and reliability expectations. Day to day, that looks like:

• Designing and building backend services in PHP/Laravel — clear domain boundaries, well-structured code, and business logic that stays understandable as the platform grows.
• Owning the data layer: MongoDB schema and index design for multi-tenant workloads, query performance under real data volumes, and migrations that ship safely without downtime.
• Building async, event-driven work that holds up — SQS-based queues, jobs, and retries designed for idempotency, backpressure, and graceful failure rather than best-case throughput.
• Owning the API contracts you publish — including deliberate schema evolution, backward compatibility, deprecation planning, and coordination with downstream consumers. A breaking change is your problem to plan for, not the caller's to discover.
• Designing for secure tenant isolation, authorization boundaries, sensitive-data handling, auditability, secrets management, and applicable privacy requirements across services, integrations, logs, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Implementing and operating third-party integrations (Twilio, Stripe, PayPal, Google, Outlook, and the SIS/CRM systems our institutions run on), including auth, rate limits, partial failure, and reconciliation.
• Holding the line on performance and cost at scale — query patterns, N+1s, payload size, and the tenant-level behavior that only shows up in production.
• Backing your work with tests: unit tests for domain and service logic, integration tests across system boundaries, and end-to-end coverage for the paths that matter.
• Shipping safely behind feature flags, watching your services in production (Sentry, CloudWatch, real usage), and owning issues from the shared triage queue when they land in your area.
• At the Senior level, you lead technical design within your area, communicate architectural trade-offs, improve code and designs through review, mentor other engineers, coordinate changes across team boundaries, and turn incidents or recurring problems into systemic improvements.

On AI: You use company-approved AI development tools thoughtfully - treat code assistants, test generation, debugging, and design exploration as core craft while you hold AI-assisted work to exactly the same bar as anything you write by hand. Every AI-generated output is reviewed, tested, and fully owned before it merges. Speed never substitutes for judgment. You also share what works, helping encode effective patterns into how the whole team operates.

How You'll Show Up

We hire for behavior as much as for experience. Technical skill gets you considered; how you operate determines whether you'll thrive here. These are the values we live by, and the ones we hire for:

• Understand the "why" before the "what." You seek the reasoning and context behind the work before diving in, so what you build actually solves the problem.
• Own the outcome. You take responsibility for the result, not just your slice of the work — from first design conversation to stable in production.
• Take initiative. You move work forward proactively, surfacing risks and unblocking progress without waiting to be told.
• Solve problems together. You engage collaboratively, share openly, and treat feedback as a professional input — the best solutions come from the team, not the individual.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering, with significant time at or near Senior level in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product.

• Deep expertise in PHP and Laravel — service and domain design, the framework's async and queue primitives, and building for performance at scale. This is our primary backend language and where most of your work will land.

• Familiarity with the TypeScript/Node.js ecosystem, particularly NestJS, is preferred for working with adjacent services.

• Strong data modeling instincts, ideally with MongoDB — schema and index design, query performance, and the tenancy considerations that come with a shared platform. Relational depth translates if you've done real document-store work too.

• Experience building async, event-driven systems — SQS-based queuing or comparable — with a practical grasp of idempotency, retries, and failure modes.

• Hands-on AWS experience (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, S3) as a service owner, not just a consumer.

• A track record designing and versioning APIs that other teams and customers depend on. GraphQL experience is a plus.

• A track record implementing third-party API integrations (e.g., Stripe, PayPal, Google, Outlook), including the unglamorous parts — auth, retries, and reconciliation.

• Automated testing across layers; Playwright or comparable E2E experience is a plus.

• Sound judgment on AI integration; production experience with OpenAI APIs or comparable LLM platforms is a plus.

• Current, hands-on fluency with agentic AI development tooling across the full lifecycle. We're a Cursor shop; experience with Claude Code, Codex, or comparable tools is equally valued.

• Excellent written communication — technical documents and PR descriptions that stand on their own.

Our Interview Process

Our process is rigorous and designed to be a real signal — for you and for us. Expect live, interactive technical assessment with our engineers, not take-home busywork or trivia. You'll be asked to demonstrate your work and reasoning directly and in real time, including how you apply AI tooling. Every candidate meets the team. We move quickly for the right people and give you a clear view of the bar before you accept.