I build the backends that have to stay up. Most recently led a 4-engineer team at Signa Sports United through a microservices migration — Symfony, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Docker. Before that, NOAA federal infrastructure at 99.9% uptime and a 48-hour incident recovery with zero data loss. 25 years, available now.
Work-authorised — EU & US · +34 675 741 692
A senior IC role on a backend product team. PHP/Symfony or Laravel. EMEA remote, fully or near-fully. I work best as an architect-level engineer who ships code, does real design reviews, and writes the runbooks the on-call uses at 2am.
I mentor through code review and design discussion — not through org charts. I write ADRs, flag risk early, and leave codebases easier to own than I found them.
Not looking for anything described as "50% hands-on / 50% people management." Both halves of that job deserve full attention.
| Location | Las Palmas, Gran Canaria — 8:00–18:00 CET |
| Timezone fit | Full European day · East Coast morning overlap · West Coast async |
| Languages | English, Spanish, German — fluent · French — intermediate |
| Employment type | Permanent employee preferred · Contract work also available · Spanish autónomo |
| Authorization | Legally authorised to work in the EU and US · No sponsorship required |
| Availability | Immediate |
Senior individual contributor on a backend product team. PHP/Symfony or Laravel. EMEA remote, fully or near-fully. Prefers companies where engineers own services end-to-end — architecture, implementation, and on-call. EU work-authorised, no sponsorship needed. Immediate start.
Engagements via Spanish autónomo entity. Fixed-price scoped projects or hourly/daily T&M. Rates on request. Minimum engagement: 3 months. Well-suited to platform migrations, greenfield backend builds, API design, or short-term capacity gaps on engineering teams.
Architecture reviews, security audits, and technical due diligence. Typically 1–2 days per week. A good fit for early-stage startups that need senior backend oversight without a full-time hire — or for teams evaluating a platform rewrite before committing headcount.
Email or LinkedIn with a brief on the role and the problem you're solving. Two sentences is fine. I reply within 24 hours.
We confirm fit on both sides — stack, team structure, eng culture, what "senior IC" means to you. No pitch deck, no slides.
Take-home, live coding, architecture discussion — whatever your process is. I'm comfortable with deep technical questions on distributed systems, PHP internals, security, and infrastructure design.
I move fast. Notice period is immediate. No counter-offer games. If it's the right fit, I say yes and we pick a start date.
Codebase deep-read, ADR and runbook review, pair sessions with the team. I ask a lot of questions early — that's intentional. I'd rather surface the wrong assumptions in week one than week eight.
Eric's deep expertise in Drupal and server infrastructure was critical to keeping our systems running at 99.5% uptime. His proactive approach to security saved us from potential disasters multiple times. I'd bring Eric back without hesitation for anything involving federal-scale infrastructure.
Eric led our microservices migration with precision. The AI-driven translation pipeline he built reduced our localization effort by 40% and the team trusted his technical leadership completely. Eric's the kind of technical lead you want when the project has no margin for error.
When we needed someone to architect a multi-tenant CMS spanning 18 consulate sites, Eric delivered a solution that drastically cut our content management overhead while maintaining a unified brand. He delivered under a scope no other vendor was willing to take on.
Drop a message below with a brief on the role or engagement. I reply within 24 hours. Alternatively: eric.maag@gmail.com or LinkedIn ↗