Senior Platform Engineer / Technical Architect

We are building an early-stage, mobile-first consumer platform designed to support substantial user-generated content, including text, documents, photos, audio and video, alongside search, discovery, external-data ingestion, moderation and high-volume participation. A limited PHP 8.3/Laravel 13 vertical slice is already in place. We are looking for a senior platform engineer who can independently assess the existing repository, shape the production architecture and potentially lead continued development as a core member of the founding technical team. This is an opportunity for an experienced builder to influence foundational decisions early, establish strong engineering standards and help turn an initial product foundation into a secure, scalable platform. INITIAL RESPONSIBILITIES ● Independently review the existing PHP 8.3/Laravel 13 codebase. ● Validate authentication, authorization, private-file security, automated tests and database design. ● Reproduce the application from a clean installation and identify gaps, risks and technical debt. ● Recommend whether to retain, revise or replace the current foundation, with clear technical justification. ● Design scalable architecture for user-generated content and multimedia. ● Design secure direct and resumable upload workflows. ● Recommend appropriate object storage, queues, transcoding, CDN and media-processing services. ● Design reporting, moderation, audit and appeal workflows. ● Plan compliant external-data ingestion through approved APIs, feeds and crawling. ● Address deduplication, entity resolution, location tagging, search and source attribution. ● Establish staging, CI/CD, monitoring, backups, secrets management and recovery procedures. ● Collaborate with the founder, implementation contractor and future UI/UX and trust-and-safety specialists. REQUIRED EXPERIENCE ● Personally shipped a production UGC, social, media, data-discovery or high-traffic platform. ● Strong backend engineering and systems-architecture experience. ● Experience building secure document, image, audio and video pipelines. ● Practical knowledge of private object storage, signed URLs, multipart uploads, queues and asynchronous processing. ● Experience with video transcoding, adaptive streaming, captions and CDN delivery. ● Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, privacy and abuse prevention. ● Experience with search, indexing, structured-data ingestion and background processing. ● Strong practices around automated testing, code review and secure deployment. ● Excellent written and spoken English. ● Ability to communicate architecture, risks, limitations and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Laravel/PHP experience is valuable because of the existing vertical slice. However, the ideal candidate will evaluate the current stack objectively and recommend changes only when supported by clear technical and product considerations. PREFERRED EXPERIENCE ● Trust-and-safety or content-moderation systems. ● Location-based feeds and discovery. ● Search infrastructure and compliant large-scale web ingestion. ● Mobile-first consumer products. ● Technical leadership across multiple developers. ● Experience scaling an early product toward substantial traffic. ENGAGEMENT STRUCTURE The engagement begins with a paid repository and architecture assessment, with an anticipated fixed budget of approximately $750–$1,500, depending on the agreed scope. A successful assessment may lead to continued implementation on an hourly or milestone-based basis, along with consideration for a long-term technical-lead or founding-engineer role. Potential equity may be discussed after the initial engagement based on performance, technical leadership, availability, working relationship and mutually agreed terms. No equity or permanent appointment is promised at the outset. Before receiving the detailed product blueprint or repository access, the selected candidate must sign nondisclosure, work-product and intellectual-property agreements. The repository, infrastructure, accounts and credentials will remain under company control. HOW TO APPLY Please provide: 1. Two relevant production platforms you personally helped build. 2. Your specific contribution to each platform. 3. How you would process a five-minute mobile video from secure upload through moderation, transcoding and global playback. 4. An example of a search, crawling or large-scale data-ingestion system you designed. 5. Your experience reviewing or inheriting another developer’s codebase. 6. Your GitHub, LinkedIn, portfolio or another verifiable professional profile. 7. Your availability for Pacific Time collaboration and earliest possible start date. 8. Your proposed price for the initial technical assessment. 9. Whether you would be open to a longer-term founding-team role following a successful initial engagement. Generic agency submissions and incomplete applications will not be considered. This is an opportunity to help shape a substantial consumer platform from its earliest stage, make high-impact architectural decisions and potentially assume a central technical-leadership role as the company grows.