What we need :

- PHP and Laravel : 7+ years of PHP and 4+ years on Laravel in production. Comfortable with modern PHP 8.x : typed properties, enums, readonly classes and constructor promotion.

- Partner-facing APIs : You've built REST APIs that outside developers integrate against, with OAuth2 or API-key auth (Laravel Passport), versioning, rate limits, consistent error envelopes and idempotent writes.

- Queues on Amazon SQS : Standard and FIFO queues, dead-letter queues, visibility timeouts, retries with backoff, and jobs that are safe to run twice. Horizon/Redis experience counts, but you should know where SQS behaves differently.

- MySQL at scale : Reading EXPLAIN, composite and covering indexes, recursive CTEs, and zero-downtime migrations on large live tables (millions of rows).

- Read replicas : Read/write splitting in Laravel, sticky connections and handling replica lag.

- Webhooks in both directions : Receiving signed webhooks (HMAC verification, replay safety, fast acknowledge then queue) and sending them to partners with retries.

- Multi-tenancy : Modelling hierarchical tenants (partner - brand - location - store). Tenant scoping on every query and permission check is a habit, not an afterthought.

- Testing : You write tests (Pest or PHPUnit) without being asked, including failure modes, cross-tenant access and duplicate submissions.

- Git : Feature branches, small reviewable PRs, cherry-picking onto release branches, resolving merge conflicts and keeping a clean history.

- Communication : Clear written English. You'll read specs, push back on wrong ones, and write API docs (OpenAPI/Swagger) and Postman collections.

- Time zone : At least 3 to 4 hours of overlap with US Pacific time.

Nice to have :

- AWS hands-on : ECS Fargate, RDS (MySQL, read replicas, RDS Proxy), ElastiCache Redis, S3, SQS, CloudFront, WAF and CloudWatch. You care what it costs and have right-sized something.

- Infrastructure and delivery : Infrastructure as code with CloudFormation (or Terraform), and CI/CD with AWS CodePipeline / CodeBuild, Docker images and rolling deploys.

- Scaling : ALB target groups and health checks, autoscaling on CPU and queue depth, and separating workloads into isolated worker lanes.

- Production debugging : Reading CloudWatch logs, finding queue backlogs and stuck jobs, and running safe diagnostics on a live database.

- LLMs in production : AI-generated responses, cost and token tracking, and rate limits.

- Third-party platforms : Google Business Profile API, Facebook Graph API, or similar review and listing sources.

- Python neighbours : Experience working next to Python services or data pipelines.

- Security : Habits that hold up in a SOC 2 environment : audit logging, secrets management, least-privilege IAM and no PII in logs. We're working toward ours now.

- Billing : Stripe metered billing, including usage-based and plan-based models with proration.

- Frontend reach : Enough React / Next.js to read and adjust the frontend that consumes your API.

- AI coding tools : Using assistants such as Claude Code responsibly : reviewing every change and keeping tests green.