Senior Software Engineer; PHP

NMI is building a mature, product-oriented Reliability Engineering function, and we’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to play a key role in that evolution.

This role sits on the Reliability Engineering team, which focuses on improving the reliability, performance, and operational maturity of critical platform services. The team’s mission is to move the engineering organization from reactive incident response toward intentional, engineered reliability through strong systems, tooling, and standards.

As a Staff Engineer, you will operate beyond a single service or codebase, designing and building reliability frameworks, platform capabilities, and guardrails that improve uptime, observability, and operational confidence. This is a highly hands‑on role with strong expectations around technical leadership, ownership, and delivery.

• Design and build reliability‑focused frameworks, tooling, and standards that improve platform uptime, performance, and operational confidence.
• Drive initiatives that move reliability from reactive response to proactive engineering, emphasizing prevention, early detection, and fast recovery.
• Partner with engineering teams to embed reliability into system design, development practices, and deployment workflows.
• Establish and evolve observability practices, including metrics, logging, alerting, and dashboards that enable clear operational insight.
• Identify systemic risks and failure patterns, and lead efforts to address them through automation, architectural improvements, and process refinement.
• Contribute hands‑on to production codebases, internal tools, and platform services with a focus on long‑term maintainability.
• Influence technical direction across teams through design reviews, technical proposals, and clear written communication.
• Improve operational maturity through better incident practices, post‑incident learning, and continuous improvement loops.
• Mentor engineers by modeling strong ownership, technical judgment, and disciplined delivery.
• Participate in on‑call rotations, with a clear mandate to reduce operational load over time through engineering.

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production‑grade software systems in complex environments.
• Strong experience developing backend services in PHP, with the ability and desire to work language‑agnostically and quickly learn new languages, frameworks, and codebases as needed.
• Proven experience working on reliable, scalable, and highly available systems, with a clear understanding of trade‑offs in performance, resilience, and maintainability.
• Practical experience designing or contributing to platform‑level reliability solutions, such as observability tooling, alerting strategies, or reliability standards.
• Solid understanding of distributed system fundamentals, including failure modes, latency, capacity, and graceful degradation.
• Experience defining and improving operational practices, including incident response, post‑incident reviews, and preventative engineering.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases and data access patterns, with an operational mindset toward performance and reliability.
• Hands‑on experience deploying and operating services in cloud environments (AWS or equivalent).
• Familiarity with secure, compliance‑aware development practices (eg: PCI, SOC 2, OWASP).
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams through clear communication, sound judgment, and collaboration.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI‑powered development and operational tools to work more effectively, improve quality, and accelerate delivery.
• Comfort working in evolving or legacy systems while actively improving them.
• A mindset oriented toward ownership, delivery, and continuous improvement, not just execution.

• Experience in payments, fintech, or other high‑availability, regulated environments.
• Hands‑on experience with monitoring, logging, and alerting platforms (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, Logz.io).
• Familiarity with containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and automation tooling.
• Experience modernizing or stabilizing legacy systems in production.
• Exposure to defining or operating SLOs and SLIs.
• Ex…