Lead Backend Developer (PHP / Symfony)

Vilnius hybrid Until 9/27/2026 First posted July 29, 2026 Last posted July 29, 2026
Job description
We’re a team of 500+ professionals who develop cutting-edge proxy and web data scraping solutions for thousands of the world’s best known businesses, including Fortune 500 companies. 

What’s in store for you:
You’ll be solving complex challenges and maintaining our own infrastructure with 60PB+ monthly data traffic. Here are its scale and maturity in numbers:

- 6PB+ Ceph storage
- 60PB+ monthly data traffic through our systems
- 300k+ service requests/sec processed
- 500k+ Kafka messages/sec streamed

The team waiting for you:

  • Our Dashboard team owns the self-service platform every Oxylabs customer uses - the product that directly moves company revenue. You'll step in as the hands-on Tech Lead for one of our squads (PLAG or EP), working side by side with our Principal Engineer and setting the technical bar for ~14 engineers across two squads. We're mid-way through a major V3 architecture migration and scaling fast, so this is a timely moment to join: there's real architectural room here to make meaningful decisions, not just execute someone else's design.

In this role, you will:

    • Lead, mentor, and support one Dashboard squad while staying deeply hands-on in code - this is a genuine 50% IC role
    • Design and develop scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems across our Symfony 7 backend
    • Own the full development lifecycle for major features - from technical design and RFCs to deployment and production support
    • Drive architecture decisions in partnership with our Principal Engineer and help finish shipping the V3 migration
    • Raise engineering standards across code review, testing discipline, incident response, and observability
    • Contribute to cross-team architecture at the Dashboard product level, including Payments integration and outbox/Kafka patterns
    • Apply our leadership principles to guide your team and drive results

Your skills & experiences:

    • Deep PHP experience with Symfony strongly preferred (we're on Symfony 7.2 / PHP 8.3), plus practical MySQL 8 skills - query optimisation, indexing, and migrations at scale
    • Hands-on experience with Kafka, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and GitLab CI
    • Solid architecture chops - event-driven patterns (outbox), dual-database designs, and API design
    • Able to guide technical decisions, review designs and code, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers
    • A clear communicator who takes ownership, enjoys knowledge sharing, and gives constructive feedback

Nice to have:

  • Experience with payments/billing systems
  • DevOps/SRE inclinations, or prior work on multi-tenant self-service platforms.

Tech stack:

    • PHP 8.3, Symfony 7.2
    • MySQL 8, Redis, Kafka (outbox pattern)
    • Kubernetes, GitLab CI, Docker
    • Dual DB: Dashboard DB (users, products) + Payments DB (transactions, billing)
    • Frontend: React 19 / RTK Query

Salary & Benefits:

    • Gross salary: 6500 - 7300 EUR/month. Keep in mind that we are open to discuss a different salary based on your skills and competencies.
    • Growth & Learning: 40+ internal learning options, external conferences, mentorship, and year-round knowledge-sharing.
    • Health & Well-being: Private health insurance, psychotherapy, on-site well-being consultants, 24/7 gym access, and a wellness app.
    • Celebration & Community: Team events, an overseas workation, quarterly team-building budgets, and plenty of ways to mark milestones together.
    • Plus bonus vacation days, paid life-moment days off, barista coffee, and all the tools you need. See the full list of benefits here: https://career.oxylabs.io/blog/our-work-benefits/
Up for the challenge? Let’s talk!
About this role

Summary

Lead and mentor backend team, design scalable systems, drive architecture, and code in Symfony PHP.

Job title

Lead Backend Developer (PHP / Symfony)

Experience level

senior level

Industry

software

Location requirements

Vilnius, remote work not specified

Salary

$7k–$7k

Management role

Yes

Skills & keywords

Required skills

phpsymfonymysqlkafkadockerkubernetesgitlab ci

Preferred skills

paymentsdevopssre

Specializations

phpsymfonykafkamysqldocker
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

Vilnius, Vilnius City Municipality, Lithuania

Hybrid City