Senior Backend Engineer - PHP / Symfony / AWS

Help us scale a live AI voice platform transforming automotive service. ZukiTalk is an early-stage technology company building conversational Voice AI for automotive dealerships. Our platform is already live in dealerships. Our AI voice assistant communicates directly with customers about vehicle service recommendations, answers questions, integrates with dealership systems, and helps service teams create a faster, better customer experience. We are past the prototype stage. We have enterprise level integration. Now we need the right senior engineer to help us scale what we've built. THE ROLE We're looking for a hands-on Senior Backend Engineer with strong PHP and Symfony experience who can take ownership of an existing production application. This isn't a role where you'll spend your days managing meetings or experimenting with technology that may someday ship. You'll be working on a product customers are using today. You'll work directly with our founder and engineering team to understand the existing architecture, strengthen the platform, solve production issues, build integrations and develop the next generation of our AI voice capabilities. We need someone who is comfortable inheriting an existing codebase, figuring things out, making thoughtful decisions and taking ownership. OUR CURRENT STACK We're specifically looking for experience with several of the technologies we use today: PHP / Symfony 7 PostgreSQL AWS, including S3 and SQS Docker Twilio GitHub Sentry AWS Lightsail Clever Cloud REST APIs, webhooks and third-party integrations Queue-based / asynchronous processing Production monitoring, debugging and observability Experience with every tool on this list isn't required. Strong PHP/Symfony experience, however, is important. If you've spent years building production applications in Symfony and understand PostgreSQL, APIs, queues, Docker and cloud infrastructure, we'd rather have you learn one of our smaller tools than hire someone who has to learn our core application framework. WHAT YOU'LL OWN You'll help us: Take ownership of our existing Symfony application. Understand the current architecture and codebase, identify risks and improve maintainability without unnecessarily rebuilding what already works. Keep production reliable. Troubleshoot issues, improve monitoring and logging, strengthen error handling and make sure problems are found and resolved quickly. Build and improve integrations. We're integrating with major automotive technology platforms. You'll work with APIs, webhooks, authentication, data mapping and asynchronous workflows. Expand our voice platform. You'll help us build new outbound and inbound communication workflows using Twilio and AI. Scale intelligently. We care about moving quickly, but we don't want unnecessary complexity. We want an engineer who knows when to improve architecture and when to leave something alone because it works. Reduce technical dependency. YOU MAY BE A GREAT FIT IF... You've spent 7+ years building production software and have significant hands-on experience with PHP and Symfony. You're comfortable taking over software originally built by someone else. You understand relational databases particularly PostgreSQL and can diagnose performance and data issues. You've built and maintained API integrations and understand webhooks, queues and asynchronous processing. You've deployed and supported production applications in AWS and Docker environments. You can troubleshoot a production issue without needing someone to tell you where to start. You're comfortable working in an early-stage company where priorities can move quickly. And importantly: You can explain complicated technical decisions to a non-technical founder without making them more complicated. BONUS POINTS Experience with any of the following is valuable but not required: Twilio or telephony systems, conversational AI, OpenAI or other LLM APIs, Voice AI, speech-to-text/text-to-speech, SaaS startups, enterprise integrations or automotive technology. AI experience is a plus. Strong software engineering comes first. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE Within your first several months, you should be able to: Understand and confidently own our existing Symfony application. Support and improve our current production environment. Understand our dealership integrations and help accelerate new ones. Strengthen monitoring, documentation and reliability. Build new voice workflows and product capabilities. Help us make smart architectural decisions as ZukiTalk grows. Most importantly, we want you to become someone our founder and team can trust when the question is: “What's the smartest way to build this?” ABOUT ZUKITALK We're a small team building something ambitious. You'll have direct influence over the product, architecture and direction of the company. You'll see dealerships actually use what you build and you'll hear quickly when something can be better. If you like having ownership, solving real problems and building rather than navigating layers of bureaucracy, you'll probably enjoy working with us. Remote — United States Competitive salary based on experience. $120,000 -$150,000, PTO Package and Long-term equity opportunity available for the right fit.