Senior Backend Engineer — Laravel (Remote AU)

Quick answer

What does the Senior Backend Engineer role at National Digital involve?

High confidence

A full-time, remote senior backend role open Australia-wide, paying $115,000–$130,000 plus superannuation. You'll design Laravel and Node.js APIs, event-driven AWS infrastructure and LLM-integrated automation, with observability and security built in.

National Digital is hiring a full-time Senior Backend Engineer (remote, anywhere in Australia) to design and run the server side of our clients' platforms — Laravel and Node.js APIs, event-driven integrations, and the AWS serverless infrastructure they ride on. You'll build systems that aren't allowed to fall over: multi-tenant SaaS, real-time data flows and LLM-integrated automation (retrieval-augmented generation, document intelligence) shipped to production with observability and security engineered in from day one. Salary range $115,000–$130,000 plus superannuation, depending on experience.

Salary

$115,000 - $130,000 per year

Key Responsibilities

Design, build and operate APIs and integrations between client systems — CRM, finance, operations
Own infrastructure as code and deployment pipelines across client AWS accounts
Engineer observability in from the start — structured logging, tracing and alerting against uptime targets
Integrate LLM services into real workflows with evaluation, guardrails and cost control
Model and migrate data when replatforming legacy systems
Mentor other engineers and contribute to architecture decisions and code review

Requirements

5+ years of professional back-end experience with PHP/Laravel 10+ (or deep Node.js experience and willingness to work across both)
Strong API design skills — REST, GraphQL, webhooks, OAuth 2.0
Solid relational database design (PostgreSQL, MySQL) plus Redis
Hands-on AWS experience — Lambda, serverless patterns, queues and event-driven architecture
CI/CD and Docker as everyday tools, with testing discipline (TDD, PHPUnit)
Security-minded engineering — OWASP Top 10, and awareness of the ACSC Essential Eight
Tertiary qualification in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent demonstrated industry experience
Based in Australia with full, unrestricted working rights (Australian citizen or permanent resident)
Willingness to complete a National Police Check and provide professional references prior to commencement

Bonus Skills / Nice to Have

OpenTelemetry or equivalent distributed-tracing experience
Terraform or AWS CDK
MQTT or other real-time / IoT messaging systems
Integration experience with Xero, MYOB, HubSpot or Shopify
Vector databases and embedding pipelines in production

Contract Details

Full-time / Remote (Australia)38 hrs/week

Benefits

Full-time remote anywhere in Australia, with genuinely flexible hours$115,000–$130,000 plus superannuation, depending on experienceTechnical ownership across long-term client platformsHardware of your choice and a professional development budgetA small senior team where architecture decisions are yours to shape

How to Apply: Send a brief summary of your experience and links to systems you've built or run — we care more about production war stories than portfolio polish. Laravel, AWS and integration work is especially relevant.

Senior Software Engineer (Backend)