Lead PHP Engineer

We are looking for a highly accountable, hands-on Lead PHP Engineer to join the Platform Feed Management team. This role owns the projects requiring the deepest technical judgment and highest release risk on the team, end to end, and serves as the team's release manager and named technical escalation path. You'll partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate business objectives into scalable, well-architected solutions, establishing patterns and technical direction for your owned projects. This is a role with real ownership and real accountability, combining hands-on engineering with technical leadership, while helping grow the technical capability of the team around you.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the named Project Owner for the projects requiring the deepest technical judgment and highest release risk on the team
• Define and evolve the architectural direction and technical patterns for owned projects, establishing standards other engineers follow
• Review and approve solution descriptions and sizing for owned projects
• Validate technical approach for owned projects, personally or by pulling in another Lead or Staff Engineer when needed
• Partner with Product on refinement, decomposition, and keeping owned projects current in Jira
• Architect and develop scalable PHP APIs, services, and solutions from concept to production as a hands-on contributor on owned work
• Own the release process and CI pipeline health for the team, and serve as the point of escalation during releases, coordinate rollbacks when needed
• Drive planned improvements to the release pipeline itself, and help grow a bench of additional releasers so release execution isn't a single point of failure
• Mentor other engineers on the team, with visible growth over time, not just ad hoc help when asked
• Serve as the pull-based escalation path for other Project Owners on the team when they need it
• Integrate AI-powered capabilities, built and maintained by the FDX AI team, into merchant-facing feed features where a project calls for it
• Model the team's technical and cultural practices, and set the example for how to engage in healthy technical disagreement

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Expertise in PHP, building scalable, production-grade APIs and services
• Familiarity with MySQL or similar relational data stores
• Capability to own delivery for medium to large, ambiguous technical problems, not just well-defined tasks or stories
• Showcase of experience mentoring engineers with visible, named growth over time
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, comfortable representing the team in cross-functional conversations
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

• Experience with modern JS/TS frameworks (Angular, React)
• Experience with caching technologies (e.g., Redis)
• Background in e-commerce, product catalogs, or sales channel/marketplace data models
• Experience integrating with AI or LLM-powered services in a production application (not building the underlying AI infrastructure)