Senior PHP / Laravel Engineer

Senior PHP / Laravel Engineer Lendzi, Boca Raton, FL (Hybrid) Reports to: Director of Technology About Lendzi Lendzi is a fintech company helping small businesses access the capital they need to grow. We connect tens of thousands of business owners every year with the right lenders through a proprietary platform that combines AI-powered underwriting, automated lender matching, and a network of dozens of capital partners. We are building the next generation of small business lending technology, and we are doing it in-house. The Opportunity We are building the in-house engineering team that will own and modernize Lendzi's lending platform end to end. This is a founding-engineer level role, reporting directly to the Director of Technology. You will work on production systems handling real lending decisions for thousands of businesses every month, and you will help architect and build the next-generation platform that replaces our current stack. You will not be one of many engineers maintaining a legacy codebase. You will be one of a small group of senior engineers operating with high leverage, accountable for production systems from day one, and partnering directly with leadership to shape the technology roadmap. What You Will Do Own production Laravel applications. Maintain, improve, and refactor our WordPress and Laravel applications. Triage and resolve issues, ship features, and harden security and reliability across the stack. Integrate with the financial ecosystem. Build and maintain integrations with external lenders and partners' APIs. Design clean, observable, repeatable abstractions for the integrations we will keep adding. Lead the AWS migration. Help with DevOps and cloud infrastructure setup and management. Architect the platform rebuild. Help design and build a consolidated modern Laravel platform with AI at the center, including merchant, partner, lender, and admin portals. Orchestrate AI agents responsibly. Use agentic coding tools as a force multiplier on every project, with rigorous engineering judgment applied to every line of code that ships. Review, validate, test, and refactor AI-generated output to production-grade standards. Build internal tools and product features that put AI to work for our team and our merchants. Set the engineering bar. Establish code review, testing, security, and deployment standards as we scale the team. Write the documentation, runbooks, and internal tooling that will let the next engineer be productive in their first week. What We Are Looking For Required 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience, with strong recent senior-level Laravel and modern PHP (Laravel 10 or 11, PHP 8.2+) production experience.

Deep MySQL skills:

schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations, and data integrity.

Production AWS experience:

ECS or EC2, RDS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, IAM, S3, SQS. Strong API design and integration experience: REST, OAuth 2.0, webhooks, retries, idempotency, rate limiting.

Security-conscious development:

PII handling, encryption at rest and in transit, OWASP Top 10, secrets management. Comfortable working in a SOC 2 environment. Real-world experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) to accelerate development, with disciplined validation of every output. We use AI aggressively. We do not ship vibe-coded software. Strong written communication. You can explain technical decisions to non-technical leadership and document your work clearly.

Self-directed:

comfortable owning production systems with limited oversight, asking the right questions, and pushing back when something is wrong. Preferred Fintech, lending, payments, or banking experience. Direct experience with Plaid, DocuSign, Zoho CRM, or comparable enterprise SaaS APIs. OpenAI or Anthropic API experience in production, including prompt engineering and structured output validation. Experience modernizing legacy applications (PHP 5.x to 8.x, Laravel 5.x to 10 or 11, or similar major-version uplifts). CI/CD pipeline setup using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, or equivalent. Filament, Livewire, Sanctum, or Jetstream production experience. A Note on AI and Engineering Judgment We will say this plainly because it matters. We are an AI-first engineering organization. We use agentic tools every day, on every project, to accelerate the work. We are not interested in engineers who treat AI as a substitute for engineering judgment. The bar at Lendzi is that every line of code that ships to production has been read, understood, validated, tested, and accepted by a senior engineer who can defend every decision in it. If your approach to AI development is generating code and pushing it without deep review, this is not the right role for you. If you see AI as a way to multiply the impact of strong engineering fundamentals, you will fit in well here. What You Get A founding-engineer seat on a small, high-leverage team. Direct partnership with the Director of Technology and company leadership. Modern stack, real autonomy, and a mandate to do things right. Competitive base salary and performance-based annual bonus. Health, dental, vision, 401(k), PTO, and standard benefits.

Hybrid schedule:

Tuesdays and Thursdays in our Boca Raton office. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from home. How to Apply Submit your resume, a brief note on why this role interests you, and links to any code or projects you are proud of (GitHub, side projects, OSS contributions). Strong applicants will be invited to complete a Laravel technical assessment, followed by an interview with the Director of Technology. Lendzi is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences.

Pay:

From $75,000.00 per year

Benefits:

401(k) 401(k) matching Dental insurance Employee assistance program Flexible spending account Health insurance Life insurance Paid time off Retirement plan Vision insurance

Work Location:

Hybrid remote in Boca Raton, FL 33432