Technical Lead – PHP Development

About the Position

Bitdefender, a cybersecurity leader, is seeking a hands-on Technical Lead – PHP Development to guide a small team of engineers in building applications supporting various aspects of our business. This role is a blend of hands-on coding and leadership, where you'll set the standard for quality through your own work and help the team design, ship, support, and grow.

Responsibilities

• Lead by Doing: Write and review production PHP code, and set the standard for quality through your own work.
• Collaboration: Work closely with the QA team, Product Owner, and System Manager on planning, estimation, and issue investigation.
• Support: Get involved in support activities, troubleshooting, and finding solutions for production issues.
• Technical Direction: Own the technical direction of the team's services, including architecture decisions, API design, and data modeling.
• Code Reviews and Mentorship: Run effective code reviews, mentor engineers, and ensure adherence to "clean code" principles.
• Planning and Estimation: Plan and estimate work, break down features, and keep the team focused.
• Engineering Practices: Champion practices like automated testing, CI/CD, static analysis, and clean, reviewable code.
• AI Integration: Explore, learn, and apply AI where feasible and add real value.
• Support Ownership: Make application health a habit, continuously improve logging and observability, and turn recurring support pain into engineering work.

Requirements

• Must-haves

  • 5+ years of professional PHP development, including experience in a leading role.
  • Strong PHP expertise, solid OOP, and deep hands-on experience with Symfony.
  • Comfort working in and gradually improving legacy code (CakePHP or similar).
  • Solid relational database skills (PostgreSQL): schema design, query optimization, indexing, avoiding N+1 traps.
  • Experience designing and consuming REST APIs.
  • A track record of writing tested, maintainable code - PHPUnit, static analysis, CI/CD.
  • Proven experience leading or mentoring developers, running code reviews, and estimating/planning work.
  • Openness to learning and applying AI.
  • Strong debugging and log-analysis skills, and a service mindset.
  • Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
  • Clear communication in English.

• Nice-to-haves

  • Caching and queues (Redis, message brokers).
  • Containerization and cloud (Docker, CI pipelines, AWS/GCP/Azure).
  • Experience modernizing or migrating legacy monoliths toward service-oriented architectures.
  • Familiarity with front-end or full-stack context enough to collaborate well.

We Offer

• Opportunity to work with a leading cybersecurity company.
• Be part of a team that protects millions of environments worldwide.
• Pioneer breakthrough innovations in cybersecurity.
• Competitive salary and benefits.

About the Company

Bitdefender is a cybersecurity leader delivering best-in-class threat prevention, detection, and response solutions worldwide. With deep investments in research and development, Bitdefender Labs discovers hundreds of new threats each minute and validates billions of threat queries daily. Founded in 2001, Bitdefender has customers in 170+ countries with offices around the world. For more information, visit Bitdefender.