Architect / Team Lead (PHP/Symfony)

Architect / Team Lead (PHP/Symfony) Full-Time | Direct Hire US Citizen, Green Card, H4, TN Visa or E3 Visa No Visa Transfer or Sponsorship Available Must currently live in the United States We're seeking an experienced Architect / Team Lead (PHP/Symfony) to lead the architecture and modernization of our SaaS platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining architectural strategy, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring our systems are scalable, secure, and built for long-term success. You'll partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate business objectives into technical solutions, establish engineering standards, drive architectural decisions, and ensure compliance with security and data privacy requirements. Responsibilities Own the overall technical architecture, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability. Translate business goals into technical strategy, architecture, and system design. Lead complex architecture initiatives, proof-of-concepts, and technology evaluations. Guide engineering teams through architectural decisions, technical challenges, and implementation. Define architectural standards, coding guidelines, and engineering best practices. Drive data architecture, database design, data modeling, and ETL/pipeline strategies. Provide architectural guidance across backend, APIs, frontend, integrations, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps. Partner with DevOps/SRE on containerization, CI/CD, observability, deployments, and operational excellence. Identify technical debt, architectural risks, and performance bottlenecks while driving continuous improvement. Ensure systems meet compliance, privacy, security, accessibility, and reliability standards. Lead architecture reviews and mentor engineers through design reviews and technical decision-making. Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI/ML opportunities, where they deliver measurable business value. Complete required compliance and HIPAA training. Leadership Responsibilities Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across multiple teams. Participate in hiring, onboarding, performance feedback, and career development. Partner with Engineering leadership on architectural planning and cross-functional initiatives. Review technical proposals to ensure alignment with long-term platform strategy. Required Qualifications 8-10 years of PHP development experience 3-4 years of experience architecting/designing enterprise-scale applications. Symfony (required). Docker Nginx MongoDB or NoSQL Linux AWS Object-Oriented Design (OOP) Domain-Driven Design (DDD) REST API Design Microservices Distributed Systems Performance Optimization Leading architecture reviews Provide technical direction across engineering teams. DevOps, containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure. Data architecture, database design, data modeling, and ETL/pipeline patterns. SOC 2 experience preferred.