Mid-Senior Software Engineer (PHP/Laravel)
Posted on:
February 25, 2026
Job description
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 Mid-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.
Responsibilities
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
Job requirements
Requirements
What We’re Looking For
- 4+ 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
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