DevOps / API Engineer — Mid-Level

⚠ DO NOT APPLY if you do not have at least 3–5 years of hands-on Laravel / PHP production experience.

⚠ DO NOT APPLY if you do not have demonstrable AWS DevOps experience.

These are absolute requirements. All other qualifications listed below are nice-to-have.

Role Summary

We are seeking a Mid-Level Laravel API Engineer / DevOps who is primarily an experienced PHP/Laravel backend developer, and also develops cloud infrastructure across our AWS environment. This is a dual-track role: you will spend the majority of your time building, maintaining, and optimizing Laravel APIs and backend services, while also supporting deployment pipelines, server configuration, and system reliability.

The ideal candidate writes clean, production-grade Laravel code daily and is equally comfortable SSH’ing into an EC2 instance to diagnose a problem. If you are a pure infrastructure engineer with no meaningful Laravel experience, this role is not for you.

Absolute Requirements - MUST-Have

The following two areas are non-negotiable. Candidates who cannot demonstrate deep experience in both will not be considered.

1. Laravel / PHP — Expert (3–5+ Years Required)

1. Minimum 3–5 years of hands-on Laravel development in production environments—this is a hard cutoff.
2. Expert knowledge of the Laravel framework: routing, middleware, service providers, dependency injection, Eloquent ORM, migrations, and artisan commands.
3. Proficiency in Laravel API development: RESTful API design, API resources/transformers, request validation, middleware pipelines, authentication (Sanctum / Passport), and rate limiting.
4. Experience with Laravel queue workers, scheduled tasks, Horizon, and Supervisor for long-running process management.
5. Expert knowledge of PHP 8.x including typed properties, attributes, match expressions, and modern OOP patterns.
6. Experience with PHP deployment workflows: Composer dependency management, environment configuration, and PHP-FPM optimization.
7. Ability to debug and troubleshoot Laravel applications in production—log analysis, error tracking (Sentry / Telescope), and performance profiling.
8. Strong understanding of RESTful design principles, API versioning, and documentation (OpenAPI / Swagger or similar).

2. AWS DevOps — Expert (Required)

Demonstrable, hands-on AWS experience is a hard requirement. Candidates without it will not be considered.

1. Deep experience with core AWS services: EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM, VPC, and Elastic Load Balancing.
2. Proven experience with AWS deployment services: CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, or equivalent CI/CD tooling on AWS.
3. Proficiency in AWS security best practices: IAM policies, Security Groups, NACLs, KMS encryption, WAF, and Shield.
4. Experience managing and optimizing AWS cost allocation and resource utilization.
5. AWS certification strongly preferred (Solutions Architect Associate, DevOps Engineer Professional, or equivalent).

3. Database Management — Expert (Required)

1. Expert knowledge of MySQL database administration: replication, backup strategies, performance tuning, and query optimization.
2. Demonstrated experience administering MySQL 8.x in production environments, including window functions, CTEs, JSON enhancements, and the data dictionary.
3. Solid understanding of database migration strategies, schema versioning, and data integrity validation.

4. Security & Compliance — Expert (Required)

1. Expert knowledge of cloud security: network segmentation, encryption at rest and in transit, secrets management, and vulnerability scanning.
2. Experience deploying and managing firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems, and DDoS mitigation.
3. Knowledge of compliance frameworks relevant to data privacy: SOC 2, GDPR awareness, or similar.
4. Proficiency in backup and disaster recovery strategies with documented RTOs and RPOs.
5. Experience conducting security audits and implementing remediation plans.

Additional Technical Skills — Nice-to-Have

Everything below is desirable, not required. Candidates who check all the boxes above but few of these will still be competitive.

Server & Web Technologies

• Experience with Apache, Nginx: SSL/TLS configuration, reverse proxy setups, and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with React, Next.js, and Node.js application deployment, including SSR/SSG hosting and CDN integration.

CI/CD & Source Control

• Experience with Bitbucket and Bitbucket Pipelines: custom runners, pipeline configuration, branch-based deployment strategies.
• Docker for containerized builds, testing, and deployment.
• Infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates).

Cloud Infrastructure — Azure

• Familiarity with Azure fundamentals: VMs, Azure DevOps, Blob Storage, Azure Active Directory, and Azure Networking.
• Ability to support multi-cloud deployments spanning AWS and Azure.
• Experience with or willingness to support AWS-to-Azure migration efforts for select workloads.

Video Transcoding Infrastructure

• Experience with transcoding tools and services (FFmpeg, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, or equivalent).
• Ability to optimize transcoding workflows for cost, quality, and throughput.

AI/ML Infrastructure

• Experience managing GPU-based compute instances (AWS EC2 P/G instances) for inference and transcoding workloads.
• Ability to build and maintain AI/ML pipelines: data ingestion, model serving, and monitoring.
• Familiarity with containerized model serving (NVIDIA Triton, TensorFlow Serving, or similar).

Core Responsibilities

Laravel API Development (Primary)

• Design, build, and maintain RESTful Laravel APIs powering web and mobile clients.
• Write well-tested, documented, and maintainable PHP code following SOLID principles.
• Manage queue workers, scheduled jobs, and background processing for async workloads.
• Collaborate with the frontend team on API contracts, versioning, and integration.
• Contribute to performance profiling, query optimization, and bottleneck resolution in Laravel applications.

Infrastructure & Deployment

• Build, test, and deploy applications across development, staging, and production environments.
• Support code and infrastructure migrations with full rollback capabilities.
• Contribute to the video transcoding infrastructure—encoding, storage, delivery, and monitoring.
• Configure and manage GPU-based compute resources for AI/ML and transcoding workloads.

Monitoring & Reliability

• Implement and maintain system performance monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.
• Proactively identify and resolve bugs, bottlenecks, and reliability issues.
• Conduct ongoing infrastructure health appraisal and recommend capacity planning adjustments.

Security & Compliance

• Deploy and manage security controls including firewalls, WAFs, network policies, and access controls.
• Maintain backup, recovery, and business continuity systems.
• Conduct regular security assessments and implement hardening measures.

Automation & Optimization

• Identify and implement automation opportunities to reduce manual effort and increase reliability.
• Design, build, and maintain automation scripts as Artisan Commands or in Bash, Python, or JavaScript.
• Continuously evaluate tools and processes to optimize performance and cost.

Preferred Qualifications

• Additional AWS certifications (DevOps Engineer Professional, Security Specialty) and/or Azure certifications.
• Experience with Terraform or other IaC tools in production multi-cloud environments.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes or ECS for container orchestration.
• Experience with monitoring/observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar).
• Background in game development infrastructure, media processing, or real-time systems.
• Experience working in small, autonomous engineering teams with full-stack ownership.

Soft Skills & Work Environment

• Strong written and verbal communication skills—critical for a fully remote team.
• Self-directed and proactive; able to identify problems and drive solutions without constant oversight.
• Comfortable documenting processes, runbooks, and infrastructure decisions.
• Collaborative mindset with the ability to work closely with a small development team.
• Growth-oriented—eager to learn and stay current with evolving cloud, security, and AI/ML technologies.

What We Offer

• Fully remote work environment with a small, focused engineering team.
• Hands-on work across cloud infrastructure, AI/ML pipelines, and media processing.
• Exposure to emerging technologies including multi-cloud architecture and AI/ML systems.
• A culture that values pragmatism, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

About Nomad Temporary Housing

Nomad Temporary Housing is the only independent operator of temporary apartments that combines the full service of an international temporary apartment company with a global network of over 3,000 quality providers, 22,000 properties, and 300,000 apartments worldwide. Founded by a pioneer of the temporary housing industry, Nomad provides unbiased, needs-driven accommodations—from garden-style apartments in Los Angeles to high-rise units in Shanghai, New York, and Vancouver, to traditional townhouses in London. With regional offices in San Diego, Phoenix, Hong Kong, and London, our engineering team builds and maintains the platforms, APIs, and infrastructure that power this global operation.

Nomad Temporary Housing is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Compensation & Benefits

Job Type: Full-time
Pay: $85,000.00 - $105,000.00 per year
Benefits: 401(k), Health insurance, Paid time off
Work Location: Remote

Experience Requirements

• Laravel / PHP: 3 years (Required)