Lead Backend Engineer

Lead Backend Developer (Laravel) London (Hybrid: 1 day per week ideally, flexibility for every other week) £80,000 - £90,000 + Strong Progression Route + Equity Are you a senior backend engineer who wants full ownership of a complex Laravel platform, working within a small team where you can directly shape the architecture, standards, and future direction of the product, with a genuine path into senior technical leadership? You will be joining an ambitious SaaS business building a platform used within the UK Energy sector to manage property data, thermodynamic calculations, compliance, and project delivery. The system is already live and growing, with market-leading businesses already onboarded relying on it for regulated work. The platform itself is a multi-tenant Laravel microservices architecture, with a domain-heavy calculation engine and multiple external data integrations. The work is technically demanding, particularly around data isolation, shared logic across services, and maintaining accuracy within interconnected calculation models. This role is hands-on and focused on ownership. You will be responsible for how the backend evolves, how services communicate, and how changes are rolled out across the system. The team is currently small, so there is significant room for the role to grow in scope and seniority as the business scales, alongside meaningful equity aligned to impact. The Role: *Lead and develop a Laravel microservices platform used in a live SaaS product *Build and maintain multi-tenant architecture with strong data isolation *Extend a scientific calculation engine with high accuracy requirements *Work across queues, Redis pub/sub, and event-driven workflows *Develop and maintain integrations with external APIs and data sources *Hybrid working, with one day per week in the London office ideally, though every other week is also workable for the right candidate The Person: *5+ years Laravel experience in complex backend or SaaS systems *Strong experience with multi-tenant architecture, shared packages, and distributed systems *Solid understanding of OAuth 2.1, identity systems, and backend security *Experience with AWS (EC2, RDS, S3), Docker, CI/CD, and Laravel Forge or Vapor *Comfortable working with Elasticsearch, async pipelines, and event-driven design Rise Technical Recruitment Ltd acts an employment agency for permanent roles and an employment business for temporary roles. The salary advertised is the bracket available for this position. The actual salary paid will be dependent on your level of experience, qualifications and skill set and will be decided by our client, the employer. Rise are not responsible or liable for any hiring decisions made by the end client. We are an equal opportunities company and welcome applications from all suitable candidates.