Senior/ Lead PHP Engineer (with AI Skills)

Toronto time zone. Project duration - 3months.

We're looking for a mature, Senior/Lead PHP Engineer with deep Laravel expertise and hands-on experience building or integrating agentic AI systems. You'll take ownership of complex backend features end-to-end, mentor other engineers, and help shape how AI-driven automation and agents fit into our product and internal workflows.

About the client:

Our client is a leading online car marketplace group operating across Europe and North America, bringing together market-leading brands to shape the future of our industry by combining the best of both regions.

What You'll Do:

• Design, build, and maintain robust backend services and APIs using PHP and Laravel
• Own features from technical design through deployment and monitoring
• Integrate and orchestrate agentic AI workflows (e.g., LLM-based agents, tool-calling pipelines, autonomous task runners) into existing products or internal tooling
• Improve system performance, reliability, and security across the stack
• Stay current with the PHP/Laravel ecosystem and emerging agentic AI tools and patterns

What You Need to Succeed:

• 6+ years of professional PHP development experience
• 4+ years building applications with Laravel (or comparable modern PHP framework experience with strong Laravel proficiency)
• Solid database skills (MySQL/PostgreSQL), including query optimization and schema design
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and cloud deployment (AWS, GCP, or similar)
• Strong communication skills and the judgment to work independently on ambiguous problems
• Hands-on GenAI experience — you've built with LLM APIs, tool/function calling, retrieval, agents, or agent frameworks and put them into real workflows.
• Modern AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) are part of how you work day to day.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills — you work well in a team, share your opinions clearly, and can move a topic forward with people across functions.
• Solid engineering fundamentals: testing, debugging, code quality, and getting things production-ready.
• English - at least Upper Intermediate+
• Work in EDT (Toronto) time zone