Available — Permanent roles & contract engagements · EMEA remote · Immediate start

Senior Backend Engineer
PHP / Symfony · EMEA Remote

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.

EU citizen · Spanish resident · No visa required EU-wide · +34 675 741 692

Quick Facts
LocationLas Palmas, Gran Canaria — 8:00–18:00 CET
Timezone fitFull European day · East Coast morning overlap · West Coast async
LanguagesEnglish, Spanish, German — fluent · French — intermediate
Compensation€65–75k for EMEA remote permanent roles · £45–65k UK · Day-rate €550/day for contract · Open to discuss
Contract typePermanent employee or B2B contract · Spanish autónomo (no intermediary needed)
AuthorizationEU citizen · Spanish resident · No visa required across EU/EEA
AvailabilityImmediate
What I'm Looking For

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.

Not looking for anything described as "50% hands-on / 50% people management." Both halves of that job deserve full attention.

Where I'd Add Value From Week One

Three proof points, each with a metric.

Enterprise · Microservices
40% localization effort cut · 30% faster load times

Signa Sports United — Microservices Migration

Led a 4-engineer team through a full microservices migration at Signa Sports United. Built an event-driven translation pipeline (Symfony, RabbitMQ, Redis, DeepL) that cut manual localization effort 40% across Chain Reaction Cycles, Outfitter Teamsport, and Internetstores. Integrated Stripe and PayPal payment gateways, optimized PHP/JS load times 30%, and delivered CI/CD on Bitbucket, Bamboo, Docker, Kubernetes.

SymfonyRabbitMQRedisDockerKubernetesMongoDBStripePayPal
Federal · HA Infrastructure
99.9% uptime · ~$150K/yr saved · 65% faster DR

NOAA — 12-Subsite Federal Infrastructure

Migrated NOAA's 12-subsite Drupal infrastructure across three US colocation centers. Engineered Bash automation for MySQL master/slave replication and a Varnish caching layer. Reduced disaster recovery time by 65%, achieved 99.9% uptime, and cut potential downtime costs by ~$150K annually. The system ran for years without unplanned outages.

DrupalMySQL replicationVarnishBashLinuxMulti-region HA
Incident Response · Security
Zero data loss · 48-hour recovery

OIDA — State-Sponsored Attack Recovery

Recovered the OIDA conference platform from a state-sponsored attack in 48 hours with no offsite backups. Reconstructed the database from transaction logs, rebuilt with a hardened multi-tier PCI-scoped architecture with audit logging on every state change. Zero data loss. The conference ran on schedule. The rebuilt architecture served three subsequent cycles without incident.

Incident responseForensic recoveryPCI scopeSecurity hardeningDrupal
Stack

What I build with day-to-day.

Languages & Frameworks

PHP 8.1/8.2  ·  Symfony 5/6  ·  Laravel 9+  ·  Doctrine ORM  ·  Python  ·  Bash  ·  JavaScript  ·  SQL

Architecture

DDD  ·  CQRS  ·  Event-driven microservices  ·  REST  ·  GraphQL  ·  Hexagonal  ·  SOLID  ·  TDD  ·  PHPUnit

Data & Messaging

MySQL  ·  MariaDB  ·  PostgreSQL  ·  MongoDB  ·  Redis  ·  Memcached  ·  RabbitMQ  ·  Varnish  ·  MSSQL

DevOps & Cloud

Docker  ·  Kubernetes  ·  AWS  ·  Jenkins  ·  Bamboo  ·  Bitbucket  ·  Git  ·  CI/CD  ·  Multi-region replication

What Clients & Colleagues Say
VH
Viktoria Hotvianska
NOAA — Federal Infrastructure
"

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.

FF
Frank Feulner
Signa Sports United — Enterprise
"

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.

AA
Arvic Arevalo
Philippine Embassy — Multi-Tenant CMS
"

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.

Ready to talk? I reply within 24 hours.

Permanent roles · Contract engagements · Architecture consultations