PHP Team Lead

About the role

eCarsTrade is a digital car marketplace serving professional buyers in more than 40 countries through an online auction platform offering over 20,000 vehicles per week. It is looking for a hands-on PHP team lead who will contribute to the platform's scalability, reliability and performance, working alongside developers and collaborating with stakeholders. The role is about 70% developer and 30% management.

Key responsibilities

• Lead a team of developers: plan their work, manage timelines, ensure code quality, improve development processes and mentor engineers.
• Manage technical debt across owned services and take ownership of technology decisions.
• Lead efforts to optimise backend performance, reliability and scalability, applying best practices and modern technologies.
• Collaborate with stakeholders, product managers, frontend and ML developers to gather requirements and deliver solutions.
• Design, develop and enhance backend applications using PHP for the auction platform.
• Use Docker for containerisation and orchestration, and implement CI/CD pipelines to automate testing, deployment and delivery.

Required profile

• 6+ years of hands-on PHP development experience.
• 2+ years of team leadership experience.
• Leadership qualities: inspiring and motivating team members, driving technical initiatives and leading by example.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, attention to detail and a passion for clean, efficient code.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills; proven track record of delivering software on schedule and within budget.
• Proficiency in both English and Russian is mandatory.

Required skills

• PHP and popular frameworks (Symfony, Laravel)
• Docker for containerisation and deployment
• Queues for background task processing
• CI/CD principles and tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI or similar
• Solid understanding of scaling principles for backend systems and infrastructure

What we offer

• Full remote position under a B2B contract.
• Multicultural, dynamic international team.
• Competitive salary.
• Fast-growing company with startup spirit and growth opportunities.