Senior Software Engineer - PHP

Location: London, England, United Kingdom

Department: Engineering

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: full

Description

Creditstar Group is a rapidly growing international consumer finance company, headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia and operating in multiple European markets.

At the core, we are a financial technology company that uses automated processes, algorithms and data analysis to make financial instruments easily available to a population of more than 175 million people in our target markets. We are a team of ambitious professionals who value innovation, effective efficiency, high growth, and high performance. For more information on the group, please visit www.creditstar.com.

Our vision is to build and deliver digital banking products of the future. If you want to be part of this, here is your chance.

What's in it for you?

• Ownership from day one. You'll shape the technical direction of the platform, not just execute tickets. We trust our engineers to drive decisions.
• A team that values craft. We allocate dedicated capacity to technical debt, run regular architecture discussions, and take engineering quality seriously - not just velocity.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve scalable backend architecture and core platform services
• Lead technical initiatives from solution design and estimation through production release
• Develop new functionality, improve existing systems, and reduce technical debt
• Ensure system scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability
• Optimize databases, APIs, caching layers, and background processing
• Identify and resolve production incidents, bottlenecks, and technical risks
• Participate in architectural decision-making and long-term platform evolution
• Conduct code reviews and maintain engineering quality standards
• Mentor developers, support onboarding, and provide technical leadership within the team
• Collaborate with Product, Growth leads, QA, and other engineering teams

Requirements

Technical:

• 5-7+ years of commercial PHP development experience
• Strong knowledge of modern PHP (8.0+) and backend engineering best practices
• Solid hands-on experience with Yii2 or willing to learn
• Experience with frontend development(Typescript, React)
• Experience designing scalable backend systems with a strong grasp of software architecture and system design principles
• Strong PostgreSQL experience: schema design, indexing, query optimization, performance tuning
• Experience designing APIs and service integrations
• Solid Git workflows, code review practices, and CI/CD experience
• Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis skills

Leadership & Ownership:

• Proven experience leading major technical initiatives
• Ability to independently drive projects from design to production
• Experience working with large legacy codebases and driving incremental modernisation without disrupting business operations
• Strong estimation, planning, prioritisation, and risk management skills
• Experience mentoring engineers

Soft skills:

• Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset
• Effective communication and collaboration in cross-functional teams
• High autonomy, accountability, and product ownership
• Product-oriented thinking with a focus on business impact.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.)

Benefits

• Dynamic, challenging, and rewarding work within a rapidly growing international company;
• Chance to contribute to the business' decision-making processes and making a tangible impact;
• Working with a talented and fun international team.
• Sports or Health insurance compensation
• Paid birthday day- off
• Regular company parties and events;
• Powerful equipment and modern tools;
• On-demand sponsorship for your professional development;
• Competitive remuneration package.