Software Engineer (Backend Team)

About Passbolt

Passbolt is an innovative cybersecurity product company that is growing quickly. Our organization is remote-first with its headquarters located in Luxembourg (Europe). We are the team behind Passbolt, the collaborative credential management platform for modern teams used by over 40,000 organizations in 50+ countries.

You will join a growing and vibrant team committed to leverage the power of open source and a state-of-the-art security architecture to challenge the status quo in the cybersecurity industry. Passbolt is and always will be an engineering company, while scaling international sales and marketing to support global operations and customer success. We're looking for versatile self-motivated enthusiasts with a knack for commercial open source software, ethics and privacy, who can think out of the box and find impactful solutions to challenges.

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Description

We are seeking a Software Engineer to join our Backend Team and contribute to the growing demands of Passbolt’s products, including a self-hosted Community Edition, a self-hosted Enterprise Edition, and a managed Cloud Edition. The security-first nature of Passbolt places significant responsibility on the API, handling data integrity, access rights management, and secure integrations with other systems while providing a seamless experience that can scale to organizations of all sizes.

As a Software Engineer, your role will involve analyzing, implementing, and improving features across Passbolt’s API products while maintaining best-in-class security standards, performance, and usability. From refining REST API entry points and business logic to ensuring robust cryptographic mechanisms and zero-trust data validation, you will contribute to every stage of development.

You and your team will be responsible for shipping the features requested by our community of users while maintaining an outstanding level of quality throughout the process. After gaining expertise and product knowledge, you’ll help us develop innovative approaches to complex technical problems, find ways to make our most demanding community members happy, and cultivate a reputation for excellence among a vast community of developers.

Technologies

• Programming Languages: PHP (CakePHP), SQL
• Complementary Programming Languages: Bash
• Markup and Styling: HTML, CSS, Less​
• Cryptography: OpenPGP, GnuPG
• Testing Frameworks: PHPUnit
• Package Managers: composer
• Version Control and Containerization: Git, Docker​
• Operating Systems: Linux, MacOS
• Modeling Language: UML
• Development Methodologies: Agile Scrum

Main responsibilities

Development & Testing

• Develop new features in PHP and CakePHP for existing products used daily by over half a million users.
• Maintain, improve and fix bugs on the existing codebase.
• Transform functional specifications into reliable API workflows, ensuring backward compatibility and security.
• Participate in code reviews to identify defects prior to launch.
• Write unit tests aiming for 80% coverage to ensure functionality and prevent regressions.​
• Develop end-to-end tests to ensure critical user journeys function correctly across various scenarios.​
• Maintain a focus on quality and simplicity; we adhere to the principle that less is more.
• Ensure compatibility across multiple platforms and environments to maintain Passbolt's versatility.​
• Optimize code for performance and scalability to handle growth and increased demand efficiently.​

Analyze & documentation

• Support the support team in refining upcoming feature requests or bug reports from clients and the community.
• Support product owners proposing functional approaches to new business cases.
• Define comprehensive and iterative technical approaches to functional problems.
• Identify opportunities for long-term structural or architectural improvements and raise proposals.
• Contribute to our extensive online documentation, including OpenAPI specifications, SDKs, and user and admin guides.
• Share findings and best practices internally through documentation and presentations.

Deployment and reliability

• Assist the release lead during releases by preparing release readiness and supporting rollout activities to minimize or eliminate downtime.
• Collaborate closely with SRE teams to maintain robust CI/CD pipelines, reducing deployment risks and streamlining releases.
• Provide technical support during incidents by investigating issues and implementing fixes that restore system stability.
• Participate in blameless postmortems by contributing to root cause analysis and ensuring corrective actions are implemented in the codebase.

Management & collaboration

• Manage your own priorities, deadlines, and deliverables to meet team commitments.
• Communicate progress, risks, and decisions early and clearly to the team.
• Support co-workers through pairing and knowledge sharing.

Data Privacy & Security

• Ensure each request for change includes a risk analysis that identifies and proposes mitigations for newly introduced security issues or risks.
• Follow secure coding/design practices to ensure all components adhere to the highest security standards. ​
• Monitor project dependencies for vulnerabilities and assist the security team in analyzing their impact.
• Patch project dependencies' vulnerabilities and ensure these updates do not introduce regressions.
• Ensure that data handled by the product development team complies with GDPR and other data protection regulations.
• Collaborate with the security and senior management teams to maintain up-to-date company policies and risk registers.
• Assist the security team in enforcing least privilege access and ensure proper segregation of roles and responsibilities.
• Participate in security exercises and help refine processes and crisis management procedures.

Skills required / qualifications

Technical Skills

• Bachelor of Science or University degree relevant to Software Engineering (e.g. Computer Science, Electronics) and/or comparable work experience/certification.
• 3+ years of experience building PHP applications.
• Proficient in building back-end applications with CakePHP, Laravel or Symfony.
• Proficient in testing applications with PHPUnit.
• Familiar with OpenAPI Specifications.
• Familiar with Git and branching models.

• Strong understanding of OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities and secure coding practices.​
• Proficient with another programming language: JavaScript, Bash, Python, Go or Rust.

Considered a plus:

• Experience developing large high-availability software systems.
• Experience with end-to-end or performance testing.
• Familiar with evolutionary database design.
• Experience with authentication systems: OAuth, JWT, WebAuthn, Duo, Yubico.
• Experience integrating user directories and similar systems: LDAP, Active Directory, SCIM.
• Familiarity with UML documentation and a willingness to use it.
• Experience maintaining a long lived-project.
• Experience contributing to an open source project.

Soft Skills

• Fluent in English, both verbal and written and preferably one other language.
• Strong analytical skills and a simple solution-oriented mindset.
• Ability to balance technical excellence with business priorities and strategic goals.
• Comfortable working in full autonomy while collaborating effectively within a team.
• Receptive to feedback and able to collaborate effectively in a team setting.
• Inspired by cybersecurity or privacy related issues. You believe in an ethical web. You understand what open source means. You live on the internet.

Considered a plus:

• Experience collaborating with remote teams in an asynchronous workflow.
• Experience writing technical blog posts or sharing knowledge through articles or talks.

Benefits of working at Passbolt

We put a lot of effort into creating a workplace where everyone has room to learn, have fun, evolve and become the best version of themselves.

Here are some benefits, provided by default:

• Work from anywhere, or from our headquarter located in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
• Work/life balance: to keep the flow going, it’s important to take regular breaks and disconnect. We provide 26 days of paid holidays / year.
• Equity for everyone. We are all in the same boat, we win together.
• When you grow, we grow: we invest in your professional as well as personal growth, through paid trainings of all types.
• In tune with yourself: is built on strong values which we stand for: transparency, openness, privacy, people-first. Read more about what we believe in here.

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