backend developer for higher education

Element451 is building an AI-powered platform that helps colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support students. Its multi-tenant, async-first platform processes student interactions and integrates AI into the product.

• Build backend services in PHP/Laravel with clear domain boundaries and maintainable business logic;
• Own MongoDB schema and index design, query performance, and safe migrations for multi-tenant workloads;
• Build asynchronous, event-driven queues, jobs, and retries with idempotency, backpressure, and graceful failure;
• Own API contracts, schema evolution, backward compatibility, deprecation planning, and coordination with downstream consumers;
• Design secure tenant isolation, authorization boundaries, sensitive-data handling, auditability, secrets management, and privacy compliance;
• Implement and operate integrations with Twilio, Stripe, PayPal, Google, Outlook, and SIS/CRM systems;
• Optimize performance and cost at scale, including query patterns, N+1s, payload size, and tenant-level production behavior;
• Write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests;
• Ship safely behind feature flags, monitor services in production, and own issues from the shared triage queue;
• Lead technical design, communicate architectural trade-offs, improve code and designs through review, mentor engineers, coordinate cross-team changes, and turn incidents into systemic improvements;
• Use approved AI development tools across coding, testing, debugging, and design; review, test, and own all AI-assisted output;
• Share effective AI development patterns with the team;
• Understand the reasoning and context behind work before implementation;
• Take responsibility for outcomes from initial design through stable production operation;
• Proactively surface risks and unblock progress;
• Collaborate openly and use feedback to improve solutions.

• 5+ Years of professional backend engineering experience, including significant time at or near Senior level in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product;
• Deep expertise in PHP and Laravel, including service and domain design, asynchronous and queue primitives, and performance at scale;
• Strong data modeling skills, ideally with MongoDB, including schema and index design, query performance, and multi-tenant considerations;
• Experience building asynchronous, event-driven systems with SQS or comparable queuing, including idempotency, retries, and failure modes;
• Hands-on AWS experience with ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, and S3 as a service owner;
• Experience designing and versioning APIs used by other teams and customers;
• Experience implementing third-party API integrations, including authentication, retries, and reconciliation;
• Experience with automated testing across multiple layers;
• Current hands-on experience with agentic AI development tools across the full lifecycle;
• Excellent written communication skills for technical documents and PR descriptions;
• Nice to have: TypeScript/Node.js and NestJS, GraphQL, Playwright or comparable E2E testing, production experience with OpenAI APIs or comparable LLM platforms, Claude Code, Codex, or comparable AI development tools.

• Live, interactive technical assessment with engineers; no take-home assignment or trivia;
• Candidates demonstrate their work, reasoning, and use of AI tooling in real time;
• Every candidate meets the team.