Location: Latvia or Lithuania (Hybrid) • Employment: Full‑time • Reports to: Co‑founder & CTO

About Evergrowth

Evergrowth is a well‑funded startup with strong traction, backed by the co-founder and former CEO of Trustpilot and US + EU investors. We build systems that must be fast, reliable, and measurable. We’re hiring a hands-on senior engineer to own our backend and infrastructure, with a special focus on architecture and databases. You’ll stabilize what exists, improve what matters, and shape what comes next.

The role

You’ll take end‑to‑end ownership of our backend, currently PHP‑heavy, while guiding the evolution of our architecture, data model, and infrastructure. You’ll work directly with the CTO to set technical direction, keep the system healthy day‑to‑day, and make pragmatic, growth and cost‑aware decisions.

What you’ll do

• Own the PHP backend in production: profiling, refactoring, reliability fixes, and targeted redesigns that reduce complexity and cost.
• Lead database design and operations: schema evolution, indexing, query optimization, migrations, backups/restore and data lifecycle.
• Map the data plane: SQL (currently MySQL, migration under consideration), BigQuery, and object storage.
• Define and evolve architecture: service boundaries where they help, event‑driven patterns, and clear APIs.
• Build and operate infra
• Improve performance at every layer: caching strategies (Redis), background jobs/queues, batching, pagination, rate limits, and CDN/object‑store usage.
• Drive security & compliance: authn/z, PII handling, encryption at rest/in transit, GDPR‑aligned data retention and access controls.
• Collaborate with AI/Feature teams to ship reliable capabilities and keep the platform stable under changing workloads.

Our current/target stack (you don’t need all of this)

• Languages & frameworks: PHP 8.x (Laravel or Symfony experience welcome), modern PHP standards (PSR), Composer; some Python in adjacent systems.
• Databases & data: MySQL/Postgres, BigQuery, Redis
• Infra & tooling: Docker, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), observability (Sentry).
• Cloud: GCP (BigQuery, GCS) and/or AWS (S3, RDS) - we value cloud‑agnostic patterns and cost awareness.

What ‘great’ looks like

• You’re an expert PHP engineer who enjoys taming legacy code responsibly - wrap with tests, profile with data, refactor without drama.
• You think in data: 1st‑class SQL skills, strong normalization/denormalization instincts, query plans and indexes aren’t scary, and you know when to partition or shard.
• You design systems with clear boundaries, measurable SLOs, and boring reliability.
• You can zoom from kernel‑level details (locks, transactions, isolation) to product goals (latency, cost, throughput).

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend software engineering, including expert‑level PHP in production systems.
• Deep SQL experience (MySQL or Postgres): schema design, performance tuning, ops, and migrations at real scale.
• Solid architecture chops: event‑driven patterns, queues, idempotency, consistency trade‑offs, API design, and resilience.
• Production ops experience: containers, CI/CD, observability, on‑call pragmatism, and incident response.
• Comfortable in a hybrid setup in Latvia or Lithuania, with a flexible schedule.

Why join Evergrowth

• Real ownership: report to the CTO, shape architecture, and set the bar for reliability.
• Impact and pace: lead, fix gnarly issues, ship visible improvements, and make durable platform choices.
• Competitive salary, well‑funded runway, hybrid work, and supportive top‑tier EU/US backers.

Hiring process (efficient and respectful)

• Intro with CTO (context, expectations, mutual fit).
• Deep‑dive on systems design & data (trade‑offs, failure modes, scaling).
• Practical working session: profile and harden a real PHP path or DB migration plan (no marathon take‑homes).
• References and offer.