Senior Software Engineer (PHP/Laravel)

Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Department: Engineering

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: full

Description

🌍 Help Support the World’s Biggest Social Justice Movements

Chuffed.org is a global crowdfunding platform powering the world’s biggest social justice movements. We’ve helped raise over $250M across 50,000 campaigns in 23 countries and we’re just getting started.

In the last year we’ve grown 3x and become the go-to platform for activists and organisations in two of the biggest social justice movements of our times: Palestine and climate justice.

We’re now hiring a Senior Software Engineer to expand our team and help us build and scale a platform that powers thousands of purpose-driven campaigns, while shaping the technical foundations that will support our next phase of growth.

What You’ll Do

We are a small, high-trust engineering team. This role is backend-leaning and central to the stability, scalability, and long-term health of our platform. You’ll take responsibility for improving and maintaining our Laravel/MySQL backend systems, with particular focus on hardening and optimising what already exists while delivering new backend functionality.

Here’s what that looks like day-to-day:

• Deliver backend support for product features, working pragmatically across the stack when needed
• Design and build scalable APIs and backend features within our existing architectural direction, with strong emphasis on performance, reliability, and maintainability
• Drive initiatives focused on security improvements, stability, and database/query optimisation
• Identify bottlenecks, technical debt, and production risks and execute pragmatic fixes
• Optimise MySQL databases to ensure high performance and reliability, including , indexing strategies, migrations, and complex queries
• Write documentation of features and concepts, and ensure existing documentation is kept up-to-date
• Use monitoring and logging tools to troubleshoot and resolve software issues, to ensure reliable application performance
• Collaborate with the customer support team to ensure common bugs or feature requests are prioritised or fixed

Requirements

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years experience as a Software Engineer, with strong knowledge of:
• PHP8 and Laravel 11+, including an understanding of modern PHP best practices
• Solid experience designing and working with relational databases (MySQL), including schema design and query optimisation
• Proven experience improving application security, reliability, and performance in production systems
• Experience writing automated tests (e.g. PHPUnit, Jest), and contributing to regression suites such as Cypress
• Good understanding of software design principles (SOLID, OOP, design patterns) and pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving product team
• Comfortable with communicating technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• A strong growth mindset - you’re not afraid to take risks, fail, and learn
• A passion for social justice and a strong desire to help Chuffed campaigners succeed
• Able to iterate quickly on product features, making pragmatic UX and UI decisions when design patterns aren’t fully defined
• Comfortable operating independently within defined technical boundaries
• Pragmatic decision-maker who understands when to escalate larger architectural concerns
• Strong executor who can take backend problems from identification through implementation without heavy oversight

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience working on systems handling financial transactions or sensitive user data
• Demonstrated experience managing AWS services
• Proven experience working with GraphQL, in a backend and/or frontend environment
• Strong working knowledge of React and/or NextJS, and confidence building production-ready UI
• Experience working with IaC principles and tools, particularly Terraform

Benefits

• $150,000 salary + super
• We value work-life balance. We work autonomously from home and meet up with the team intermittently to collaborate in-person. We’re based in Sydney and Melbourne but open to remote employees within Australia
• Work alongside industry leading marketers and digital engineers in a small and agile team with deep industry connections
• Spend your days amplifying the work of campaigners pushing for progressive social change around the world

We’re building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage people from all backgrounds, ages and abilities to apply. We value all kinds of experiences, so even if you don’t meet all of the requirements outlined above, we encourage you to apply.