Back-End Developer (PHP / Laravel)

Who are we? Tomplay is a leading innovator in the digital music industry, offering interactive sheet music for musicians of all levels. With a mission to transform the way people learn and enjoy playing music, we combine technology with creativity to deliver exceptional user experiences. The Tomplay app is used by more than 2M musicians in 157 countries. The company has entered into a distribution partnership with Yamaha and Kawai, the world's largest instrument manufacturers, as well as key licensing agreements with dozens of publishers, positioning Tomplay's platform as the leader in interactive music learning. More information is available at www.tomplay.com. Job summary: We are looking for a back-end developer near the start of their career to work across the PHP systems that run Tomplay: tomplay.com → the public website, catalogue, shop and accounts. Laravel 10 on PHP 8.2, layered architecture, Solr-backed search.Web services → the API our mobile, desktop and web players call. Plain PHP, no framework, high traffic, plenty of history. Both systems share one MySQL database and are maintained by a small team alongside our internal tools. You’ll work across the stack, from shipping website features to fixing API endpoints used by our apps. We’re looking for someone who learns fast, asks good questions and is comfortable working with both modern Laravel architecture and legacy PHP/SQL. You’ll get real responsibility early and the opportunity to grow into owning key areas of the product. This is a hands-on role. You write code every day. What you will do: Build and maintain features across the website, the app API and our internal tools.Write and optimise MySQL queries against a database the whole product depends on.Build and maintain APIs consumed by our web, mobile and desktop clients.Debug production issues and make them not come back.Use AI-assisted development to move fast, and take full responsibility for what you merge.Help push our testing and code quality forward. There is a lot of room here.Work directly with product, design, the app team and the music team. What we require from you: 1–3 years of professional back-end experience, with hands-on PHP and Laravel experience.Strong SQL skills, including joins, read an EXPLAIN and have a decent instinct for why something is slow.Git, REST APIs, and code of yours that has run in production somewhere.You actively use AI-assisted development tools and understand where they add value, where they fall short, and how to validate their output.You read the code before asking, you ask when you are actually stuck, and you propose things nobody asked you for.You own what you ship: you test your work thoroughly, understand the code you merge and take responsibility for its quality. When feedback does come, you take it well. Good written and spoken English.Self-motivated and able to organise your own day. Remote work only works if you can. Any of the following would be a plus: Multi-step AI workflows (Claude Code, Cursor or similar), with a strong approach to quality control.AWS, Docker, CI/CD.Redis, memcached, queues, caching.Solr or another search engine.Front-end familiarity (Blade, JS, webpack).Side projects, open source, or anything you built because you wanted to.Interest in music, music technology, or playing an instrument. Technical details: Start date: as soon as possible Salary: competitive, will be discussed during the interview Location: Europe, in a time zone within 1 hour of CET/CEST, with full availability during our core working hours. Person of contact: Natalie Olivero. To apply: Please send your CV and a short cover note to nolivero@tomplay.com. Tell us about something you built recently, how you used AI while building it, and one thing you would change about it now.