Backend Engineer (Laravel)
Build and maintain the APIs behind SEED's admin portal, partner console and public sites.
About the role
SEED Global Education helps students find the right postgraduate programme abroad, and helps universities reach the right students. Almost everything we do runs on one Laravel codebase: the admin portal our team works in every day, the console our partner schools log in to, the scholarship engine, and the APIs behind our public sites. We are looking for a backend engineer to own a meaningful slice of that. You will be the second engineer on the API side, so you will have real say in how things are built rather than picking up tickets someone else has already specified. The work is a mix of new product features, tightening what already exists, and making the data our teams rely on trustworthy. We work hybrid from our Mumbai office, with two or three days in the office depending on what is going on that week.
What you'll do
- Design, build and maintain REST APIs in Laravel that serve the admin portal, the partner console and our public sites
- Model the data properly — schools, programmes, scholarships, applications — and keep migrations clean and reversible
- Write tests for the paths that matter, and keep the suite fast enough that people actually run it
- Review pull requests from the frontend team where they touch API contracts, and keep those contracts documented
- Investigate and fix production issues, including the unglamorous ones in background jobs and scheduled tasks
- Work directly with the people who use the admin portal to understand what they actually need before building it
What we're looking for
- 3-5 years building backend applications, at least two of them with PHP and Laravel
- Comfortable with relational data modelling and writing SQL by hand, not only through an ORM
- You have designed an API that someone else consumed, and handled versioning it when requirements changed
- Experience with queues, scheduled jobs and the failure modes that come with them
- You write tests as a matter of course, and can explain what you choose not to test
- Clear written English — a good deal of our decision-making happens in writing
Nice to have
- Worked with a React frontend and understand what makes an API pleasant to consume
- Experience integrating a third-party CRM such as HubSpot
- Exposure to data pipelines or reporting workloads
- Any experience in education, admissions or a marketplace product
About SEED Global Education
SEED helps students reach universities they were told were out of reach. Founded in 2020, we work with 110+ partner institutions, run business school festivals and masterclasses, and have guided more than 350,000 students — from offices in London, Accra and Mumbai.
We hire for judgement and care over pedigree. If you meet most of what is above and the work sounds like yours, apply — we would rather read your application than have you rule yourself out.