Senior Backend Engineer

About ScoreApp

ScoreApp is a lead-generation platform that helps users create interactive quizzes, scorecards, and surveys. Our tools provide personalized feedback to our users audiences while collecting valuable data to help users attract, engage, and convert high-quality leads. ​​ScoreApp works across industries, including coaching, consulting, marketing, education, HR, and wellness. Ultimately, any business looking to engage its audience, qualify leads, and drive sales can benefit from using ScoreApp. We’re a fast-growing, innovative team passionate about simplifying marketing through intelligent technology, empowering thousands of entrepreneurs and brands to turn insights into impact.

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who combines deep PHP/Laravel expertise with a genuine fluency in AI-assisted development. This is a backend-first role, you’ll own the performance, security, and reliability of our platform, but with a real opportunity to work across the full stack as we build out our AI product suite.

The right person will be someone who has spent years building and scaling backend systems, worked in fast paced engineering teams and who has also embraced AI tooling not as a gimmick, but as a genuine multiplier in how they write, review, and ship code.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and evolve our Laravel backend, designing APIs, background jobs, queue architecture, and data pipelines that serve a growing customer base
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks: slow queries, N+1 problems, inefficient caching, and infrastructure scaling challenges
• Lead code reviews with a sharp eye for security vulnerabilities, performance regressions, and architectural debt
• Build and integrate AI-powered features into the product, working with LLMs, embeddings, and automation workflows
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and frontend engineers to ship complete features end-to-end
• Contribute to frontend work (React) when needed, we don’t expect you to be a CSS wizard, but you should be comfortable shipping across the stack with the help of modern AI tooling
• Champion engineering best practices: testing, CI/CD, monitoring, documentation, and incident response

Key Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of professional backend experience with PHP and Laravel
• Strong understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL), you can read an EXPLAIN plan, design efficient schemas, and optimise queries that matter
• Proven experience identifying and fixing performance and security issues in production systems
• Demonstrated fluency with AI-assisted development (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) not just awareness, but a genuine integration into your daily workflow
• Experience with code review as a craft, you catch things others miss and you elevate the team’s work
• Comfortable with modern DevOps practices: CI/CD pipelines, containerisation, cloud infrastructure (Heroku and AWS preferred)

Bonus Skills

• Experience with React or a willingness to contribute to frontend work alongside AI tooling
• Familiarity with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, embeddings, or vector databases
• Experience building SaaS products at scale (multi-tenant architecture, usage-based billing, etc.)
• Background in marketing technology, lead generation, or CRM systems
• Open-source contributions or a visible engineering presence (blog, talks, GitHub)

Why ScoreApp?

• High-impact work, your code directly powers the growth of thousands of businesses
• AI at the core, we’re not just talking about AI, we’re building it into every layer of our product
• Autonomy and ownership, small, senior team where you’ll have real influence over technical direction
• Flexible working, hybrid role based in the UK, with fully remote available for the right candidate
• Growth trajectory, fast-growing company with the ambition and resources to match
• Competitive salary and benefits package

How To Apply

Send us your CV along with a short note on how you currently use AI in your development workflow. We’re less interested in buzzwords and more interested in how you actually work.