Principal Engineer - PHP Developer

Hello! Thanks for checking out our job posting for the role of Principal Engineer - PHP Developer ’ve already taken a tiny step towards being a part of our team – huzzah! 🦜

We know that taking your next career step is as exciting as it can be exhausting. So, with that in mind, we’ve tried to keep our description simple and cliché‑free to help you decide if Perch Peek and this role are a good match for you.

At Perch Peek we dream of a borderless world where people have the freedom to live and work where they please. Where ideas and resources flow where they’re most needed unrestricted by national borders.
We strive to create a world of opportunity for anyone, anywhere – one move at a time
.

Have you ever relocated? If so, you probably know how overwhelming it can be—immigration hoops, tax implications, housing, shipping, utilities, banking… the list goes on. No matter where in the world you go, relocating is complicated, time‑intensive, and stressful. Perch Peek was conceived to change that.

We’re building a streamlined Mobility ecosystem to empower businesses and individuals to move anywhere in the world. We support employers and employees through every stage of the relocation process, providing an affordable, scalable, high‑value service, powered by technology and relocation expertise.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer with deep expertise in Laravel
. You won't just be shipping code – you’ll be defining the technical strategy that scales our app API. In this role you will own the quality, scalability, and security of app API, remove technical bottlenecks and solve “hard” engineering problems, elevate the team’s output, improve PR standards, and draw the right balance between tech‑debt and speed of delivery (optimising for business requirements).

Ideally, you are a backend authority who also has the pragmatic full‑stack skills (especially React

JS) to unblock features and drive delivery end‑to‑end.

Whilst every role in a startup has a degree of flexibility over time, here is what we see as the role’s main responsibilities:

• Architect high‑performance, scalable APIs that serve as the backbone of our platform.
• Making high‑stakes decisions on scalability, maintainability, data modeling, and performance.
• Elevate the entire engineering team by setting high standards, conducting rigorous PR reviews.
• Make smart trade‑offs between “perfect code” and speed to market, understanding that engineering is a lever for business growth.
• Champion reliability and observability. You build it, you run it! Ensure our systems are debuggable, resilient, and performant in production.
• Ship complex, high‑value features end‑to‑end. You are hands‑on and lead from the front, unblocking the team on the hardest technical challenges.

The type of person we think will be awesome in this role will likely have a track record of the below skills and experience:

• Extensive commercial experience (sweet spot is 8‑12 years) designing and building mission‑critical SaaS platforms using Modern PHP & Laravel. You understand the framework’s internals.
• Practical experience implementing Domain‑Driven Design
• Sufficient experience with React
  
  JS and Type Script to comfortably handle full‑stack features and unblock frontend challenges when necessary.
• Deep experience with modern testing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines (we use Git Hub Actions), and maintaining “production‑ready” code standards.
• Demonstrated ability to prioritise business value and “move rapidly” over perfection.
• Ability to explain complex technical trade‑offs to non‑technical stakeholders in simple terms.

While not necessary, we’re especially interested in candidates with the below:

• You thrive in ambiguity and are comfortable driving projects forward autonomously in a fast‑paced environment.
• Deep familiarity with AWS services beyond just EC2 & RDS.
• Experience tuning complex SQL queries
• Handling large datasets in different formats.

Total compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to demonstrated skill set, years and depth of relevant experience, location and…