Full Stack Engineer (Backend Focused)

Full-Stack Engineer (Backend Focus) 📍 Remote (Europe-based) | Freelance engagement | US timezone overlap required About the Company A profitable, founder-led US SaaS platform serving event and conference organizers worldwide. The product is mature, the customer base is loyal, and the engineering team is small and fast-moving. The codebase is a PHP monolith with Laravel services, MySQL/Percona, Redis, and a Go payment service. There is real backend work to own and real systems that need a second owner. The Role You own backend execution of a production platform that real customers depend on every day. The mission is to ship features end to end through the API and data model, reduce single-owner risk on critical systems, and pick up frontend work on your own slice when that path runs faster. This is not a maintenance role, the roadmap is active and the backend moves with you. Responsibilities Ship features across controllers, models, queries, migrations, and API contracts with the sustained throughput of a multi-person backend team Own full-stack vertical slices from schema design through API to UI, pairing as a peer with the frontend-focused engineer so neither one blocks the other Take ownership of systems where a single engineer holds too much, becoming the second owner on critical paths and the first where no real depth exists Establish and uphold backend conventions: query patterns, migration discipline, data-integrity rules, API contracts, and test structure Monitor and improve backend health over time, query performance, N+1 detection, test coverage on payment, auth, and org-context resolution as CI gates Write PRs that carry the context behind decisions, split large changes into reviewable slices, and document systems while learning them Requirements Strong PHP backend experience, comfortable owning controllers, models, queries, migrations, and API contracts in a production monolith MySQL or Percona depth: reads query plans, avoids N+1s, understands index and schema design, runs migrations without data loss Full-stack range on your own slice: PHP templating, vanilla JS or jQuery-era patterns, enough to ship the UI end to end without blocking a frontend peer Experience working autonomously from roadmap and product specs, surfacing blockers and data-model disagreements in writing rather than waiting to be asked Comfortable adopting unowned code: reconstructs intent from the codebase itself, documents what is non-obvious, leaves systems safer to operate than found Laravel experience for API service work; REST API design and contract discipline Nice to Have Prior experience with billing systems or Chargebee Redis or Memcached for caching and query strategy Familiarity with Go at read level for understanding payment service integrations What's on Offer Fully remote, Europe-based, overlap with US working hours Long-term freelance placement embedded directly in the client's engineering team Competitive rate for a senior profile with real backend ownership scope High autonomy and direct impact on a production platform with an active roadmap