PHP and Laravel Developer

Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Sector: Technology, Information & Media

Company Size: 500 - 1,000 Employees

Employment: Full-Time, Permanent

Experience: 10 - 14 Years (Engineering Leadership)

Level: Engineering Manager / Group EM

ABOUT THIS MANDATE :

Recruiting Bond has been exclusively retained by one of India's most prominent and well-established digital platform organisations operating at the intersection of Technology, Information, and Media to identify and place an exceptional Engineering Manager who can lead engineering teams through an enterprise-wide AI adoption and digital transformation agenda.

This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership role at the nexus of people, product, and technology. The organisation is executing one of the most ambitious AI transformation programmes in its sector and this Engineering Manager will be a core driver of that change. You will lead multiple squads, own engineering delivery end-to-end, embed AI tooling and practices into the team's DNA, and shape the engineering culture of tomorrow.

We are seeking leaders who code when it matters, who build systems and teams with equal conviction, and who view AI not as a trend but as a fundamental shift in how great software is built.

THE OPPORTUNITY AT A GLANCE :

AI-First Engineering Culture :

• Own AI adoption across your squads - from LLM tooling integration to automation-first delivery workflows. Make AI a default, not an afterthought.

Hands-On Engineering Leadership :

• Stay close to the code. Lead architecture reviews, unblock engineers, and set the technical bar - not just the management agenda.

People & Org Builder :

• Grow engineers into leaders. Build squads of 615 across functions. Drive hiring, career frameworks, and a culture of psychological safety.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES :

1. Hands-On Technical Engagement :

• Remain deeply embedded in the technical work participate in design reviews, architecture decisions, and critical code reviews
• Set and uphold the engineering quality bar : performance benchmarks, security standards, test coverage, and release quality
• Provide technical direction on backend platform strategy, API design, service decomposition, and data architecture
• Identify and resolve systemic technical debt and architectural risks across team-owned services
• Unblock engineers by diving into complex problems debugging, pair programming, and system analysis when it matters
• Own key technical decisions in collaboration with Tech Leads and Principal Engineers; balance pragmatism with long-term sustainability

2. AI Adoption, Integration & Transformation (2026 Mandate) :

• Define and execute the team's AI adoption roadmap - from developer tooling to product-facing AI features
• Champion the integration of GenAI tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT) across the full engineering workflow coding, testing, documentation, incident response
• Embed LLM-powered capabilities into the product : recommendation engines, intelligent search, conversational interfaces, content generation, and predictive systems
• Lead evaluation and adoption of AI-assisted SDLC practices : automated code review, AI-generated test suites, intelligent observability, and anomaly detection
• Partner with Data Science and ML Platform teams to productionise ML models with robust MLOps pipelines
• Build team literacy in prompt engineering, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and AI agent frameworks
• Create an experimentation culture : run structured AI pilots, measure productivity impact, and scale what works
• Stay ahead of the AI tooling landscape and advise senior leadership on strategic AI investments and engineering implications

3. People Leadership & Team Development :

• Lead, manage, and grow squads of 6 - 15 engineers across seniority levels (L2 through L6 / Junior through Staff)
• Conduct structured 1 : 1s, career growth conversations, and development planning with every direct report
• Design and execute personalised AI upskilling programmes ensure every engineer develops practical AI fluency by end of 2026
• Build and maintain a high-performance team culture : clarity of ownership, accountability, fast feedback loops, and psychological safety
• Drive performance management fairly and rigorously recognise top performers, manage underperformance constructively
• Lead technical hiring end-to-end : define job requirements, conduct bar-raising interviews, and make data-driven hire decisions
• Contribute to engineering career frameworks and level definitions in partnership with the VP / Director of Engineering

4. Engineering Delivery & Execution Excellence :

• Own end-to-end delivery for multiple product squads from planning and scoping through production release and post-launch stability
• Implement and refine agile delivery frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, Shape Up) calibrated to squad needs and product cadence
• Drive predictable delivery : maintain healthy sprint velocity, manage WIP limits, and ensure dependency resolution across teams.
• Establish and own engineering KPIs : DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate), uptime SLOs, and velocity trends
• Lead incident management : build blameless post-mortem culture, own RCA processes, and drive systemic reliability improvements
• Balance technical debt repayment with feature velocity negotiate prioritisation transparently with Product leadership

5. Strategic Leadership & Cross-Functional Influence :

• Serve as the primary engineering partner for Product, Design, Data, and Business stakeholders translate ambiguity into executable engineering plans
• Participate in quarterly roadmap planning, capacity forecasting, and OKR definition for engineering teams
• Represent engineering in leadership forums articulate technical constraints, risks, and opportunities in business terms
• Contribute to org-wide engineering strategy : platform investments, build-vs-buy decisions, and shared infrastructure priorities
• Build relationships across geographies (Mumbai HQ + distributed teams) to maintain alignment and delivery cohesion
• Act as a culture carrier and ambassador for engineering excellence, innovation, and responsible AI use

AI TRANSFORMATION LEADERSHIP 2026 EXPECTATIONS :

In 2026, Engineering Managers at this organisation are expected to be active architects of AI transformation not passive observers. The following outlines the specific AI leadership expectations for this role :

AI Developer Productivity

• Drive measurable uplift in developer velocity through AI tooling adoption. Target : 30%+ reduction in code review cycle time and 40%+ increase in test coverage automation by Q3 2026.

LLM & GenAI Product Features

• Own delivery of GenAI-powered product capabilities : intelligent content, semantic search, personalisation, and conversational UX in production, at scale.

AI-Augmented Observability

• Implement AI-driven monitoring and anomaly detection pipelines. Reduce MTTR by leveraging predictive alerting, intelligent runbooks, and auto-remediation scripts.

Team AI Fluency :

• Build mandatory AI literacy across all engineering levels.
• Every engineer understands prompt engineering basics, AI ethics guardrails, and responsible AI deployment practices.

Responsible AI Governance :

• Partner with Security, Legal, and Data Privacy to ensure all AI deployments meet compliance standards, bias mitigation requirements, and explainability benchmarks.

TECHNOLOGY STACK & DOMAIN FAMILIARITY REQUIRED :

• Languages: Java/ Go/ Python/ Node.js /PHP /Rust (must be hands-on in at least 2)
• Cloud: AWS / GCP / Azure (multi-cloud exposure strongly preferred)
• AI & GenAI: OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini APIs /LangChain /LlamaIndex / RAG / Vector DBs / GitHub
• Copilot: Cursor /Hugging Face
• Containers: Docker /Kubernetes /Helm /Service Mesh (Istio / Linkerd)
• Databases: PostgreSQL /MongoDB / Redis / Cassandra / Elasticsearch / Pinecone (Vector DB)
• Messaging: Apache Kafka /RabbitMQ /AWS SQS/SNS /Google Pub/Sub
• MLOps & DataOps: MLflow /Kubeflow / SageMaker / Vertex AI /Airflow /dbt
• Observability: Datadog /Prometheus /Grafana /OpenTelemetry / Jaeger /ELK Stack
• CI/CD & IaC: GitHub Actions ArgoCD / Jenkins / Terraform /Ansible /Backstage (IDP)

QUALIFICATIONS & CANDIDATE PROFILE :

Education :

• B.E. / B.Tech or M.E. / M.Tech from a Tier-I or Tier-II Institution - CS, IS, ECE, AI/ML streams strongly preferred
• Demonstrated engineering depth and leadership impact may complement institution pedigree

Experience :

• 10 to 14 years of progressive engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a formal Engineering Manager or equivalent people-leadership role
• Proven track record of managing and scaling engineering teams (615+ engineers) in a fast-growing SaaS or digital product environment
• Hands-on backend engineering background must be able to read, write, and critique production code
• Direct experience driving AI/ML feature delivery or AI tooling adoption within engineering organisations
• Exposure across start-up, mid-size, and large-scale product organisations, preferred adaptability is a core requirement
• Strong CS fundamentals: distributed systems, algorithms, system design, and software architecture
• Demonstrated career stability minimum of 2 years of average tenure per organisation.

The Ideal Engineering Manager in 2026 :

• Leads with context, not control, empowers engineers while maintaining accountability and quality
• Is fluent in both people language and technical language, switches registers naturally with engineers and executives alike
• Sees AI as a force multiplier for the team, not a threat. Actively experiments with and advocates for AI tooling
• Measures success by team outcomes, not personal output. Takes pride in what the team ships, not what they build alone
• Creates feedback loops obsessively between product and engineering, between seniors and juniors, between metrics and decisions
• Has strong opinions, loosely held, brings conviction to discussions but updates on evidence
• Invests in engineering excellence as seriously as delivery velocity knows that quality and speed are not opposites

WHY THIS ROLE STANDS APART :

AI Transformation at Scale :

• Lead one of the most significant AI adoption programmes in India's digital media sector.
• Our decisions will shape how hundreds of engineers work in 2026 and beyond.

Hands-On & Strategic Balance :

• A rare EM role that actively encourages technical depth.
• Stay close to the code while owning the people agenda - the best of both worlds.

Established Platform, Real Scale :

• 5001,000 engineers, proven product-market fit, and the org maturity to execute.
• This is not a greenfield startup gamble it is a serious company with serious ambition.

Clear Leadership Growth Path :

• A visible, direct path toward Director / VP of Engineering.
• Senior leadership is invested in growing its next generation of technology executives.

1. Development of new web applications.
2. Maintenance of existing web applications.
3. Writing server-side web application logic in Ruby.
4. Create back-end components.
5. Connect the application with the other web services.
6. Extending and maintaining JSON and Liquid-based APIs.

Role description:

We are looking for a LEAD- Fullstack with expertise and experience in designing and developing applications including new developments, enhancements, maintenance and support. The role involves continuous collaboration with team, partners.

Candidate description:

Should have:

• Passion for technology and financial domain with demonstrated ability to learn quickly
• Delivery focus with ability to take full ownership
• Strong commitment to quality and delivery
• Strong communication skills

Skills/Knowledge and experience:

• Object oriented design and development skill
• Webservices - Node JS/Express JS, Rest API
• Frontend –, React, Angular (Javascript and Typescript)
• Unix and Shell scripting
• SQL Proficiency, good to know MongoDB

What you need to have:

Responsibilities:-

• Produce clean, efficient code based on specifications
• Integrate software components and third-party programs
• Verify and deploy programs and systems
• Troubleshoot, debug and upgrade existing software
• Gather and evaluate user feedback
• Recommend and execute improvements
• Ensure highest standard of performance, quality, and responsiveness of the applications.

Requirements:-

• Overall 3-7 years of software engineering experience working with web applications and backend systems.
• At least 2 years of experience in production environment working with Ruby on Rails along with common libraries such as RSpec, Sidekiq, Redis.
• Strong understanding of concepts like MVC, ORM, and RESTful
• Strong understanding of Object Oriented Programming fundamentals.
• Strong understanding of server-side templating languages like SLIM and CSS pre-processors like SASS.
• Basic understanding of front-end technologies such as JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.
• Strong experience working with Linux like Operating Systems and shell environments like Bash, ZSH.
• Strong knowledge of integrating multiple databases into one system.
• Basic understanding of systems architecture and fundamental design principles behind a scalable web application.
• Ability to understand business requirements, derive database schemas and translate them into technical specifications and code.
• Strong hands on experience of Relation Databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL with ability of benchmarking and performance optimisation.
• Strong knowledge of any NoSQL database like MongoDB.
• Strong experience practicing TDD and writing test cases to achieve highest code coverage.
• Experience working with search engines like Elasticsearch, Solr is a plus.
• Experience integrating third party software and payment gateways is a plus.
• Experience deploying applications to cloud and setting up CI/CD is a plus.
• Experience building container images using tools like Docker is a plus.
• Experience with any popular JavaScript frameworks like React JS, Angular JS is a plus.
• Ability to learn new languages and technologies.

Basic Qualifications:

• 2+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• Programming experience with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
• 1+ years of experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems.

Additional Job requirements

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science/Math or equivalent
• BS in computer science or related field.
• 2+ years of relevant professional software development experience: designing, developing, and delivering software written in Java, C#, or C++, web development.
• Knowledgeable in object-oriented design patterns.
• Experience building highly scalable and distributed systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with service-oriented architecture and application/services development
• Passion for performance debugging and benchmarking
• Ability to clearly and concisely communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders across all levels of the organization

• Collaborate with the team members to understand the client requirements.

• Advance coding skills in PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Scripting language desirable.

• Must have experience in working on frameworks such as Laravel, CodeIgniter.

• Write clean and well-structured codes.

• Produce detailed technical product descriptions.

• Troubleshoot, test and maintain the core product software along with the databases to ensure strong functionality and optimization.

• Contribute to all the software development phases.

• Follow the industry’s best practices for writing clean code.

• Develop and deploy the latest features that facilitate the relevant tools and procedures if required.

• Improve the code-base of our products in a significant manner