Senior PHP Engineer, Remarketing (f/m/x)

• To design, develop, test, deploy, monitor, and maintain 30+services and applications
• Use your hands-on experience, and “can-do” attitude to solve complex problems
• Raise the bar and drive technological innovations to keep AUTO1 at the cutting-edge
• Inspire those around you to push boundaries and excel
• Collaborate with various engineering and product teams to ensure our high business standards, and take the chance to get involved with other technologies and other fields of software development.

1. Core PHP & Ecosystem Mastery (Must Have)

• Modern PHP Proficiency: Deep expertise in PHP 8.2+, utilizing modern features such as Attributes, Enums, Readonly classes, Fibers, and strict typing.
• Framework Expertise: Advanced architectural experience with major frameworks like Symfony or Laravel, understanding the internal kernel, request lifecycle, and dependency injection.
• Standardization (PSR Mastery): Practical understanding of PHP-FIG (PSR) standards beyond just code style (PSR-12). Ability to leverage interfaces for Autoloading (PSR-4), Caching (PSR-6/16), and HTTP Messages (PSR-7) to write framework-agnostic code that plays well with the broader ecosystem.
• Testing Culture: Strong command of testing strategies (Unit, Integration) using PHPUnit or Pest, with a focus on writing testable code.

1. Software Architecture & Design Principles (Must Have)

• Design Patterns: Practical application of GoF design patterns (Factory, Strategy, Observer) to solve business problems cleanly.
• Architectural Clarity: Experience implementing decoupled architectures such as Hexagonal Architecture (Ports & Adapters) or Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles.
• Ambassador of Modular Architecture: Acts as a champion for SOLID principles and Clean Architecture, aggressively advocating for loose coupling and high cohesion. You don't just write code; you design systems that resist entropy, ensuring that every class and module has a distinct responsibility and is easily extensible without side effects.
• Readability over Micro-Optimization: A strong preference for writing clean, expressive, and maintainable code. You understand that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and believe that clear code is easier to optimize later than optimized code is to read now. You only sacrifice readability for speed when hard profiling data demands it.

1. Infrastructure & DevOps Mindset (Working Knowledge)

• Containerization: Working knowledge of Docker; able to spin up local environments, troubleshoot containers, and understand basic Dockerfile definitions without needing to be an expert in multi-stage optimization.
• CI/CD Awareness: Familiarity with how pipelines function (e.g., GitHub Actions), able to troubleshoot basic build failures, and understand the deployment flow.

1. Data Persistence & Strategy (Critical Skill)

• RDBMS Mastery: Strong proficiency with relational databases (MySQL or PostgreSQL), including complex query optimization, indexing strategies, and schema design for data integrity (ACID).
• NoSQL Proficiency: Experience with NoSQL stores (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB, or Redis) and understanding when to utilize document-based storage for flexibility or high throughput.
• Architectural Decision Making: The ability to clearly articulate "SQL vs. NoSQL" trade-offs.
• Choose RDBMS for: Strictly structured data, complex relationships, and transactions.
• Choose NoSQL for: Rapidly changing schemas, massive scale horizontal partitioning, or high-velocity unstructured data.

1. Observability & Metrics (Important Working Experience)

• ELK Stack Proficiency: Proven experience using Kibana as a primary investigative tool.
• Investigate: Proficient in querying logs (KQL or Lucene syntax) to trace errors, identify root causes of production incidents, and filter noise.
• Analyze: Ability to aggregate log data to spot trends, anomalies, or recurring patterns in application behavior.
• Monitor: Experience creating and maintaining Kibana dashboards to visualize real-time application health and business-critical events.
• Structured Logging: Discipline in writing structured logs (JSON) to ensure they are indexable and queryable within Elasticsearch.
• Application Monitoring (APM): Working experience with APM tools to trace request lifecycles and latency across services.
• Metrics-Driven Debugging: The ability to diagnose production issues by correlating system metrics (CPU/Memory) with business metrics (API Latency).

1. Nice to Have: Polyglot Strategy (PHP vs. Go)

• Basic Go Familiarity: A working understanding of Go (Golang) syntax and basic concurrency concepts.
• Strategic discernment: The ability to theoretically identify when it might be appropriate to switch to a language like Go (e.g., for high-concurrency microservices) versus staying in PHP, without necessarily needing to build the bridge between them yourself.

1. Added Advantage: AI & Modern Tooling

• Basic AI Integration: Conceptual understanding of how to connect web applications to LLMs via APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic).
• RAG Concepts: Basic know-how of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)—understanding the concept of fetching data to contextually inform an AI response, without needing deep expertise in vector databases.
• MCP Servers: Understanding of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard; ability to configure basic MCP servers to connect AI assistants with local tools or data sources.
• Coding Assistants : Experience working with AI coding assistants to be part of AI native teams will be an added advantage.
• Async Operations: Conceptual understanding of message queues (RabbitMQ, Redis) for handling background tasks.

Join us, building the best way to buy and sell cars!

You do not meet 100% of the requirements? Take your shot and apply anyway! We offer room for growth and challenges to learn from.

Wojciech Łysek

At AUTO1 Group we live an open culture, believe in direct communication, and value diversity. We welcome every applicant; regardless of gender, ethnic origin, religion, age, sexual identity, disability, or any other non-merit factor.

We provide the largest selection of used cars in over 30 countries and offer fully digital and easy financing solutions to merchants and consumers.

We revolutionize the used car market with our well-known brands Autohero, wirkaufendeinauto.de, and AUTO1.com.

• Colleagues who strive for excellence while using the latest technologies. See what we do in our Tech-Blog: https://auto1.tech
• Team and company events like Hackathons, International Nights, Company Party, Football and more
• You will work with some of the most talent engineers in the city, and have the chance to learn and exchange experiences with our In-house training courses
• Are you already located in the EU and looking for a remote position? If we have an entity where you are, you are good to go