Company Overview
Crewfare powers travel for the biggest events on the planet. When major leagues, racing series, festivals, and live-entertainment companies need to move thousands of people into hotels around a game, a race, or a festival, our platform runs it. We’re growing rapidly, fully remote, founded by a Forbes 30 Under 30 team, and we ship fast.
Job Overview
We’re growing the team behind the systems that run every booking, and we want another senior backend engineer to own the hardest parts alongside our tech lead: the systems where correctness, concurrency, and reliability are non-negotiable.
This isn’t a role where you’ll be handed small tickets. You’ll be one of the most-trusted engineers on the problems that keep the business running, with real autonomy over architecture and direction.
Work Environment
- Fully remote – we work across U.S. and Latin America time zones (core hours 9:00 AM–5:00 PM ET)
- Genuinely AI-forward – our founders build with AI daily and expect engineers to as well
- Small team, marquee clients, fast cycles, real ownership
Responsibilities
The tech you’ll work with day to day, so the right people can self-select:
- PHP on a large, service-oriented, namespaced (PSR-4) codebase – Services, Controllers, Models – Composer-managed dependencies, and a PHPUnit suite. The work is substantial backend engineering: real domain logic, data integrity, and scale.
- MySQL / MariaDB on RDS, multi-tenant via per-event table prefixes – hundreds of tenant table-sets per install, plus dedicated white-label installs (each its own EC2 + RDS).
- Redis object cache, transients, and distributed locks; Apache + PHP-FPMbehind an ALB.
- Payments across Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net, and Adyen; SAML / Okta / WorkOS SSO; Skyflow for PII/card vaulting; hotel-supplier inventory (Expedia + sourced); Twig + dompdf for emails/PDFs; SES for delivery.
- A React + TypeScript admin SPA (webpack) on top – full-stack range is a plus, but the backend is the job.
- AWS: EC2 + SSM, multiple RDS instances, ALB target groups, multi-account. You’ll work close to production, with real visibility into logs, metrics, and the database.
What you’ll work on
-
- Spiky, high-stakes workloads – event on-sales and room blocks where traffic spikes hard and room-night inventory can’t oversell. Holds, contention, idempotency, and getting the count right under concurrency.
- Payments and money movement – multi-currency capture/reconciliation across multiple processors, payment plans, refunds, and “the cart total must equal the checkout total must equal the confirmation email” correctness where a bug costs real dollars.
- Reporting & inventory integrity – the single-source-of-truth problem: making sold/held/available reconcile across the inventory tab, dashboards, exports, and every report. A surprising amount of senior backend work lives here.
- Multi-tenant data & schema reliability – migrations that iterate every tenant idempotently without storming RDS, schema/collation drift across white-label installs, and read-paths that survive legacy data shapes.
- Integrations – hotel suppliers, SSO providers, payment processors, and PII vaulting, all with messy real-world edge cases.
- Performance & reliability – N+1 and slow-query hunting, cache-invalidation correctness across tenant prefix-switches, moving synchronous work (payments, email, PDF) off the request path, RDS right-sizing, atomic deploys, and keeping it all standing under load.
- Core backend for Backstage (enterprise hotel/event management), All Access (consumer bookings), and our new unified platform, Spotlight.
Qualifications
- Serious PHP depth – you’ve owned complex backend systems in production, not just CRUD. Framework name matters less than your ability to reason about a large, real-world production codebase.
- Deep relational-DB skill (MySQL/MariaDB): data modeling, indexing, query tuning, online migrations on large tables, and reading slow-query logs / EXPLAIN to find the real bottleneck.
- Caching correctness, not just caching: you understand that the bug is almost always invalidation – across object cache, transients, and tenant boundaries.
- Strong concurrency instincts: race conditions, idempotency, queues/background jobs, and reasoning about failure modes before they page you.
- Comfortable operating prod: logs, profiling, SSM, and diagnosing issues that only reproduce against real production data shapes (collation drift, partial migrations, orphaned rows).
- High ownership, low hand-holding – trusted with the hardest problems, and you verify your own work before calling it done.
- You use AI tooling to move faster (we’re aggressively AI-forward), but your engineering judgment is the value, not the autocomplete.
Bonus
- High-concurrency / limited-inventory domains: ticketing, payments, travel/hospitality, marketplaces
- Large multi-tenant monolith experience (hundreds of tenants, modular/plugin-style architecture)
- MySQL/MariaDB and Redis at scale; AWS (EC2/RDS/SSM/ALB/SES)
- Payment-processor integrations (Stripe/Braintree/Adyen/Authorize.net) and SSO (SAML/Okta/WorkOS)
- React/TypeScript for full-stack reach on the admin app
Serious PHP depth with complex production systems; deep MySQL/MariaDB skills; caching correctness; concurrency and idempotency; production operations; high ownership; AI tooling usage.
Key Responsibilities
- building backend systems
- managing payments
- ensuring data integrity
Skills & Tools
PHP, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, Apache, PHP-FPM, Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net, Adyen, SAML, Okta, WorkOS, Skyflow, Expedia, Twig, dompdf, SES, React, TypeScript, webpack, AWS, EC2, SSM, RDS, ALB
Job Details
- Category: Software Development
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time
- Workplace: Remote — United States or Mexico
- Languages: English
About Crewfare
A fully remote platform powering travel and hotel bookings for major events. — Industry: Information Technology