Senior PHP Engineer, Remarketing (f/m/x)

Company Description

AUTO1 Group is a multi-brand technology company dedicated to building the best way to buy, sell, and finance cars. Our established platforms provide a quick and easy method for consumers and professional car dealers across Continental Europe to buy and sell used cars at haggle-free, competitive prices. We offer the largest selection of used cars in over 30 countries and provide fully digital, easy financing solutions for merchants and consumers.

We are seeking a technically skilled Senior PHP Engineer in Poland to join our dynamic Remarketing Technology team. AUTO1's remarketing business encompasses vehicle sourcing, inspection, and resale to dealerships through digital platforms. AUTO1 Group stands as Europe's leading digital automotive platform, revolutionizing the used car market with our renowned brands: Autohero, wirkaufendeinauto.de, and AUTO1.com.

Our Offer

• Work alongside colleagues who strive for excellence using the latest technologies. Discover more on our Tech-Blog.
• Participate in team and company events such as Hackathons, International Nights, Company Parties, Football, and more.
• Collaborate with some of the most talented engineers, with opportunities to learn and exchange experiences through our in-house training courses.
• Remote position available if you are already located in the EU and we have an entity in your country.

Job Description

Your New Role:

• Design, develop, test, deploy, monitor, and maintain over 30 services and applications.
• Apply hands-on experience and a "can-do" attitude to solve complex problems.
• Elevate standards and drive technological innovations to keep AUTO1 at the cutting-edge.
• Inspire team members to push boundaries and excel.
• Collaborate with various engineering and product teams to ensure high business standards, with opportunities to engage with diverse technologies and software development fields.

Qualifications

1. Core PHP & Ecosystem Mastery (Must Have)

   • Modern PHP Proficiency: Deep expertise in PHP 8.2+, utilizing modern features like Attributes, Enums, Readonly classes, Fibers, and strict typing.
   • Framework Expertise: Advanced architectural experience with major frameworks such as Symfony or Laravel, including understanding the internal kernel, request lifecycle, and dependency injection.
   • Standardization (PSR Mastery): Practical understanding of PHP-FIG (PSR) standards beyond just code style (PSR-12). Ability to leverage interfaces for Autoloading (PSR-4), Caching (PSR-6/16), and HTTP Messages (PSR-7) to write framework-agnostic code.
   • Testing Culture: Strong command of testing strategies (Unit, Integration) using PHPUnit or Pest, with a focus on writing testable code.

2. Software Architecture & Design Principles (Must Have)

   • Design Patterns: Practical application of GoF design patterns (Factory, Strategy, Observer) to solve business problems cleanly.
   • Architectural Clarity: Experience implementing decoupled architectures like Hexagonal Architecture (Ports & Adapters) or Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles.
   • Ambassador of Modular Architecture: Champion SOLID principles and Clean Architecture, advocating for loose coupling and high cohesion. Design systems that resist entropy, ensuring distinct responsibility and extensibility for each class and module.
   • Readability over Micro-Optimization: Strong preference for clean, expressive, and maintainable code. Understand that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and prioritize clear code, sacrificing readability for speed only when profiling data demands it.

3. Infrastructure & DevOps Mindset (Working Knowledge)

   • Containerization: Working knowledge of Docker; able to set up local environments, troubleshoot containers, and understand basic Dockerfile definitions.
   • CI/CD Awareness: Familiarity with pipeline functions (e.g., GitHub Actions), capable of troubleshooting basic build failures and understanding deployment flows.

4. Data Persistence & Strategy (Critical Skill)

   • RDBMS Mastery: Strong proficiency with relational databases (MySQL or PostgreSQL), including complex query optimization, indexing strategies, and schema design for ACID data integrity.
   • NoSQL Proficiency: Experience with NoSQL stores (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB, or Redis) and understanding their application for flexibility or high throughput.
   • Architectural Decision Making: Ability to articulate "SQL vs. NoSQL" trade-offs clearly.
     • Choose RDBMS for: Strictly structured data, complex relationships, and transactions.
     • Choose NoSQL for: Rapidly changing schemas, massive scale horizontal partitioning, or high-velocity unstructured data.

5. Observability & Metrics (Important Working Experience)

   • ELK Stack Proficiency: Proven experience using Kibana as a primary investigative tool.
   • Investigate: Proficient in querying logs (KQL or Lucene syntax) to trace errors, identify root causes of production incidents, and filter noise.
   • Analyze: Ability to aggregate log data to spot trends, anomalies, or recurring patterns in application behavior.
   • Monitor: Experience creating and maintaining Kibana dashboards to visualize real-time application health and business-critical events.
   • Structured Logging: Discipline in writing structured logs (JSON) for indexability and queryability within Elasticsearch.
   • Application Monitoring (APM): Working experience with APM tools to trace request lifecycles and latency across services.
   • Metrics-Driven Debugging: Ability to diagnose production issues by correlating system metrics (CPU/Memory) with business metrics (API Latency).

6. Nice to Have: Polyglot Strategy (PHP vs. Go)

   • Basic Go Familiarity: Working understanding of Go (Golang) syntax and basic concurrency concepts.
   • Strategic Discernment: Ability to theoretically identify when it might be appropriate to switch to a language like Go (e.g., for high-concurrency microservices) versus staying in PHP.

7. Added Advantage: AI & Modern Tooling

   • Basic AI Integration: Conceptual understanding of connecting web applications to LLMs via APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic).
   • RAG Concepts: Basic knowledge of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)—understanding the concept of fetching data to contextually inform an AI response.
   • MCP Servers: Understanding of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard; ability to configure basic MCP servers to connect AI assistants with local tools or data sources.
   • Coding Assistants: Experience working with AI coding assistants for AI-native teams is an added advantage.
   • Async Operations: Conceptual understanding of message queues (RabbitMQ, Redis) for handling background tasks.

Additional Information

Join us in building the best way to buy and sell cars!

If you don't meet 100% of the requirements, we encourage you to apply. We offer room for growth and challenges for learning.

Contact

Wojciech Łysek

At AUTO1 Group, we foster an open culture, believe in direct communication, and value diversity. We welcome every applicant, regardless of gender, ethnic origin, religion, age, sexual identity, disability, or any other non-merit factor.