PHP Engineer

Wand • New York, NY

3d • Remote

About The Position

Wand makes gaming magical. Through game customization and guidance, we build tools that helps players have more fun in their favorite games. Our platform works across thousands of PC games, ensuring that great games are accessible to everyone, regardless of time constraints, skill level, or accessibility needs. We want to build the future of game assistance, and we're hoping you'll join us.

We're hiring a PHP Engineer to build and own the internal tooling that powers Wand's Global Ops teams, specifically Maps & Testing. You'll build and maintain the backend services and internal tools these teams rely on day-to-day, and increasingly work on AI-driven features like automated maps QA. You'll partner closely with the backend team and the Global Ops teams who depend on your work.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You're self-managing, opinionated, and take ownership of what you ship when you push code, you're around to support it. You'll measure your own success by what the teams shipped because your tooling made it easy.

Requirements

• 5–6 years building production backend systems in PHP, ideally for a consumer product with real scale. Prior experience operating at a senior level, without needing to be the most senior person in the room. You can talk about what you built, who used it, and what shipped because of it.
• Strong with PHP 8.5 Laravel, with hands-on Laravel Nova experience.
• Working knowledge of TypeScript, enough to wire a feature end-to-end when needed.
• Relational data modeling at scale (MySQL, MariaDB, or Postgres). You've made the call between a wide table and a join table and lived with the consequences.
• Experience building internal tools, APIs, or automation systems.
• Outcome-oriented and high ownership. You measure yourself by what the team shipped, not by what you personally wrote. Ambiguous problems read as interesting, not as blockers.
• Fluent with the AI tooling that's reshaping how engineers work. Claude Code or equivalent, the coding-agent ecosystem, MCPs, the workflows people actually use day-to-day. You stay current because you find it interesting, not because someone told you to.
• Strong written and verbal communication. You write a design doc that gets read all the way through.
• Self-managing. You can pick up an ambiguous initiative and drive it without daily check-ins.

Responsibilities

• Own the tooling for Maps & Testing
• Scope, design, ship, and stabilize the internal tools and services the Maps & Testing teams depend on. Own the fix when something misbehaves.
• Build and maintain features in Laravel Nova and related backend surfaces.
• Make the architectural calls, data model evolution, caching boundaries, where to spend latency budget, when to refactor and when to rewrite.
• Work fluidly across the data layer. Relational stores at scale (MySQL, MariaDB) and document stores (Firestore) are both in the toolkit, and you know which to reach for and when.
• Treat performance, observability, and operational health as part of "done." Dashboards and alerts ship with the feature.
• Build AI-powered features and automation
• Work on AI-driven features and pipelines, including automated maps QA and other automation for Maps and testing workflows.
• Move across the stack when the work demands it, open TypeScript PRs when a feature is better wired end-to-end than handed off.
• Have opinions on the workflows and product surfaces your tools support, not just API shapes.
• Drive the roadmap
• Take ownership of what you work on, what you cut, and what you sequence. The bar is that you eventually drive your area on your own.
• Push cross-cutting initiatives nobody else will, observability gaps, data model debt, perf regressions, API hygiene.
• Provide substantive code review and raise the level of design discussions when the design needs it.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity package.
• Fully remote work arrangement.
• The chance to build core infrastructure for an audience of 40M+ players who will actually feel the difference.
• A team of people who genuinely love games, move incredibly fast, and care deeply about what they build.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed