Senior Software Engineer (PHP) at Vultr
$120,000–$135,000from the description
Jul 21, 2026
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Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A backend-focused senior engineering role centered on building and scaling the PHP and MySQL systems that underpin a large cloud infrastructure platform. Day-to-day work spans designing high-traffic RESTful APIs, optimizing database performance, implementing asynchronous workflows, and contributing to architecture decisions and incident response. Suited to engineers with at least five years of professional PHP development and hands-on experience with containerization, observability tooling, and API security practices.
Senior level · 5+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 11,200 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 6,700–24,200
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
PHP 8+ is explicitly required with 5+ years of professional software development experience; Laravel, Symfony, and Slim are listed as interchangeable framework examples under the same requirement.
The observability tooling requirement lists Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry as examples ('etc.') — these are treated as interchangeable alternatives for the same requirement gate.
Message queue systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, Redis Streams) are listed as 'such as' examples under a single required capability; RabbitMQ is used as the primary with the others as alternatives.
Cloud infrastructure platforms are listed as 'Vultr, AWS, GCP, or Azure' — treated as interchangeable alternatives for the same required cloud experience gate.
OpenAPI specification knowledge is mentioned in the responsibilities section (not the qualifications block) and is captured as preferred.
No degree requirement is stated anywhere in the posting.
Read the full posting
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