Senior PHP / Laravel Engineer

We are seeking an expert PHP / Laravel Engineer to develop a high-scale multi-supplier sync engine. The project involves integrating RabbitMQ, MariaDB, Postgres, and Medusa to ensure seamless data synchronization across multiple suppliers. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in backend development and experience with message brokers and database systems. This is a part-time role with a focus on delivering high-quality solutions efficiently. The stack 1. Laravel 10+ admin panel ("Backstage"): supplier, inventory, product, and order management. Blade plus Vue, MariaDB 10.6, Redis, S3 / Cloudflare R2, SendGrid, Pusher. 2. 10 PHP CLI worker services (no web layer) consuming jobs from RabbitMQ: product sync, price and stock sync, order routing to suppliers, Medusa create/update, draft handling, monitoring. 3. Two databases: MariaDB for operational and supplier data, PostgreSQL for the Medusa catalog and orders. The workers keep both consistent under heavy write volume. 4. Redis for cache, sessions, and queue state. Meilisearch for search indexing. 5. Scale: the price and stock sync alone runs 40+ worker replicas. The full system runs 150+ replicas processing thousands of product updates per minute. 6. Infra: deployed on Railway. Telegram alerting on worker health, queue depth, and sync failures. Currency conversion (supplier USD to AED) inside the price path. What you will work on first Audit the worker and Laravel codebases and flag the highest-risk issues: memory leaks in long-running CLI workers, silent sync failures, DB contention, currency-conversion bugs, stale cache. Fix price and stock accuracy and out-of-stock propagation to the storefront. Optimize worker throughput and database query performance. Harden monitoring, retries, and error handling. Then move into ongoing feature work and new supplier integrations. Must have 5+ years PHP, strong Laravel (10+). Real production experience with long-running PHP CLI workers and message queues. RabbitMQ preferred, or comparable (Redis queues, SQS, Kafka). Strong MySQL / MariaDB and PostgreSQL: query optimization, indexing, transactions, concurrency control. Redis for cache and queue. Proven ability to debug memory and performance issues in PHP daemons. Comfortable in a Dockerized multi-service environment with a Git-based workflow. Able to navigate an unfamiliar codebase and become productive quickly with minimal hand-holding. Nice to have Medusa.js or other headless commerce (Shopify app dev, Magento, custom). E-commerce, marketplace, drop-ship, or supplier-integration background. Meilisearch or Elasticsearch. Railway, or similar PaaS (Render, Fly.io, etc.). Vue.js for admin-panel work. How we will start The first step is a short, unpaid orientation audit (4 to 5 hours): read the codebase, document the architecture as you understand it, and deliver a prioritized list of issues and quick wins. If that goes well, we move straight into ongoing hourly work. Logistics Hours: 15 to 20 hours per week to start, scalable as the relationship grows. Overlap: at least 4 hours of daily overlap with Gulf Standard Time (UTC+4). Communication: Slack plus short async written updates. We move fast and value direct communication over status meetings. To apply Skip the generic cover letter. In two or three short paragraphs, tell us: 1. The most complex PHP queue or worker system you have run, and what specifically broke at scale. 2. How you approach diagnosing and fixing a memory leak in a long-running PHP CLI process. 3. Your relevant headless-commerce or supplier-integration experience. Please answer the screening questions along with the above details. Applications that do not address these will be passed over.