Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Element451 is building an AI-powered platform that helps colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students. The Senior Backend Engineer will own backend services, data models, APIs, integrations, asynchronous systems, security, testing, and production operations across a multi-tenant platform while contributing to technical design and mentoring other engineers.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
Skills
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Familiarity with the TypeScript/Node.js ecosystem, particularly NestJS, is preferred for working with adjacent services
- GraphQL experience is a plus
- Sound judgment on AI integration; production experience with OpenAI APIs or comparable LLM platforms is a plus
Company Overview