Senior Backend Developer
The Role

We are looking for a Senior PHP Developer to join our backend engineering team in Timisoara. This is a senior, hands-on role for an experienced engineer who enjoys working on APIs at scale, contributing to technical direction, and helping raise the bar across a mature and evolving backend platform.

You will work alongside a team of 10 full-time backend engineers and several long-term contractors, taking ownership of complex technical work and occasionally leading technical projects. While this is not a people-management role, you will act as a senior technical influence, mentoring others and contributing to architectural decisions, with a clear progression path towards Technical Lead or Principal Developer for the right person.

Modern engineering practices are central to how we work. You’ll be encouraged to make daily practical use of AI tools to improve productivity, code quality and delivery, and to help promote effective AI usage across the backend team. The role offers the chance to work with a modern Laravel based stack, microservices, CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure, within a flexible hybrid working model.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Development & Technical Ownership

• Design, build and maintain high-quality backend services and RESTful APIs using PHP and Laravel.
• Take ownership of complex features and technical initiatives, occasionally acting as technical lead on projects.
• Contribute to architectural discussions around APIs, services, data and system scalability.
• Ensure solutions are performant, secure, maintainable and aligned with agreed standards.

Quality, AI & Ways of Working

• Use AI coding assistants and tools as part of your daily workflow to support development, refactoring, testing and code review.
• Help promote effective and responsible use of AI tools across the backend team.
• Champion good engineering practices including code reviews, automated testing and CI/CD.
• Work within and help evolve an agile delivery environment

Collaboration & Mentoring

• Work closely with front-end engineers, QA, Product and other stakeholders to deliver reliable, well-designed solutions.
• Mentor and support less experienced engineers through code reviews, pairing and knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to technical documentation and shared team knowledge.

Location

The role is hybrid, with a minimum expectation of one in-office team day per month in Timisoara. Additional ad-hoc office days may be required for planning sessions or visits from colleagues. Occasional travel to Belfast office may be required. Candidates should be based in Romania, ideally within reasonable travelling distance of the Timisoara office. Office Address: Strada Maresal Constantin Prezan, 140 Timisoara, 307211.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong commercial experience as a Senior PHP Developer.
• Excellent knowledge of PHP, Laravel and RESTful API development
• Experience working on backend systems at scale, including service-based or microservice architectures.
• Solid understanding of relational databases (e.g. MySQL) and performance considerations.
• Experience working with modern development workflows, including CI/CD.
• Practical day-to-day use of AI tools to support software development.
• Strong communication skills and fluent written and spoken English.

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Experience with AWS or cloud-based infrastructure.
• Strong focus on automated testing (unit and integration testing).
• Experience contributing to architectural evolution of mature systems.
• Familiarity with front-end technologies or full-stack collaboration.
• Experience working with long-lived platforms and iterative modernisation.

Personal Attributes

• Pragmatic, delivery-focused and comfortable working with complex systems.
• Curious and motivated to keep knowledge, skills and practices up to date.
• Confident influencing technical decisions.
• Collaborative and supportive team player with a mentoring mindset.
• Organised, dependable and able to manage competing priorities.
• Can identify with and commit to our company values:
  SMART:
  We are innovative and strategic
  We find better ways to do things
  EFFICIENT
  We maximise productivity and value for money
  We minimise waste and duplication
  OPEN
  We are one team – diverse, loyal and respectful
  We welcome new ideas, challenge and change
  PASSIONATE
  We are ambitious, positive and driven
  We celebrate the success of our company and colleagues
  ACCOUNTABLE
  We are responsible, trustworthy and dependable
  We do what we say we will

Remuneration

• Seopa offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package, including:
• 13th Salary
• Free private medical insurance
• Free access to our nominated e-learning platform
• Team building and company dinner events
• Sports plan

About Seopa

Founded in 2003 with branches in Belfast (Head Office) and Timisoara, we are an industry leader in creating and hosting insurance, finance and utility price comparison engines. In addition to providing our software and systems to other companies, we also operate our own insurance comparison brands – Quotezone.co.uk and CompareNI.com.

Used by millions of people each year, our systems enable insurance and utility providers to secure business within their target markets and empower consumers to easily identify providers who meet their financial product requirements at market-leading prices. Our Affinity Partnerships enable other companies to offer additional financial services on their websites and increase their revenues. Our products are used by over 400 financial partners in the insurance, finance and utilities industry.

Our success is recognised by a series of awards including six consecutive Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards, a Deloitte EMEA Technology Fast500 award, several prestigious Deloitte Best Managed Companies awards (2017, 2018 & 2019), three Gold Standard Best Managed Companies award status (2020, 2021 and 2022) and Platinum Standard Best Managed Companies award 2023, 2024 and 2025.