Senior PHP Developer

Build What Powers the Future of Lending

Are you the kind of PHP pro who can spot a missing semicolon from a mile away and still explain it without making anyone cry? Perfect, we’re looking for you!

We’re on the hunt for a Senior PHP Developer who’s ready to roll up their sleeves, write clean, scalable code, and help us build some pretty awesome products. You’ll be working with a collaborative team that values smart ideas, good humor, and the occasional meme drop in Slack.

Senior PHP Developer (Dark Horse AI Platform) - Come Build Cool Stuff With Us

Location: Austin, TX (Hybrid Friendly)
Team: Engineering
Reports to: Engineering Leadership

About the Role

Gravity Lending is scaling Dark Horse, our internal AI and automation platform that powers intelligent workflows across our lending ecosystem — including our Loan Origination System (LOS), customer and lender portals, and internal operational tooling.

We’re looking for a Senior PHP Developer who can design and build reliable, high-performance backend services that connect data, workflows, and AI-driven capabilities — securely, efficiently, and at scale.

This role is ideal for an engineer who:

• Cares deeply about clean architecture and performance
• Enjoys working close to the data (MySQL-heavy systems)
• Is comfortable operating in regulated, PII-sensitive environments
• Wants to collaborate closely with ML engineers to bring AI features into real production systems (not demos)

What You’ll Do

Backend & API Development

• Build and maintain Dark Horse backend services using PHP 8+, including:
• APIs and service modules
• Internal tooling
• Workflow orchestration services
• Design secure, well-structured endpoints that support AI workflows:
• Chat and session services
• Tool/action execution
• Retrieval and orchestration requests

Data & Performance Engineering

• Design and optimize MySQL data access patterns at scale:
• Indexing and query optimization
• Schema design
• Stored procedures where appropriate
• Tune performance across services using caching, background jobs, and profiling tools.

Security & Compliance

• Implement secure handling of PII and sensitive financial data, including:
• Encryption and hashing strategies
• Access control and authorization
• Audit logging and traceability
• Safe data egress patterns
• Partner with Security to ensure Dark Horse services meet SOC-minded controls and privacy-by-design principles.

Reliability & Engineering Excellence

• Lead by example on:
• Code quality and reviews
• Testing strategies
• Refactoring and technical documentation
• Improve platform reliability through:
• Idempotency and retry strategies
• Rate limiting and failure handling
• Incident-ready logging, metrics, and observability

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Product and ML engineers to translate AI capabilities into stable, production-ready features.
• Integrate with third-party and internal services (credit, valuation, identity, LOS modules, messaging, and queues).

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional PHP development experience
• Strong command of PHP 8+, object-oriented design, and API architecture
• Deep experience with SQL/MySQL:
• Schema design
• Indexing strategies
• Query planning and performance tuning
• Experience building secure, production-grade REST services, including:
• Authentication and authorization
• Input validation
• Rate limiting
• Familiarity with modern engineering practices:
• CI/CD pipelines
• Automated testing
• Code reviews
• Git-based workflows
• Comfortable working in environments handling sensitive, regulated data

Nice to Have

• FinTech, lending, underwriting, or regulated-data experience
• Experience integrating AI or LLM services, or building APIs used by AI agents
• Knowledge of encryption and hashing best practices:
• Salting / peppering strategies
• Key management
• Experience with queues and workers (SQS, RabbitMQ, Redis)
• Familiarity with SOC 2, auditability, and least-privilege system design

Tech You’ll Likely Use

PHP 8.2+, MySQL, Redis, Docker, Linux, Nginx, queues/workers, GitHub Actions (or similar CI), observability tooling, AWS services, JSON-based APIs.

Compensation (Austin Base Salary)

• Minimum: $105,000
• Target: $120,000
• Maximum: $135,000

(Final compensation based on experience and scope of responsibility.)

Why Gravity Lending?

• Work on impactful, real-world AI applications
• Collaborative team that values strong engineering principles
• Opportunity to shape a rapidly evolving platform
• Hybrid flexibility with meaningful in-person collaboration

Pay: $105,000.00 - $135,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Employee assistance program
• Employee discount
• Flexible spending account
• Health insurance
• Health savings account
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Location:

• Austin, TX 78728 (Required)

Ability to Commute:

• Austin, TX 78728 (Required)

Ability to Relocate:

• Austin, TX 78728: Relocate before starting work (Required)

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Austin, TX 78728