Senior Backend Engineer (NXJ-183)

The Role

Your job is to take ownership of that platform, stabilise it, and then evolve it from a functional commerce stack into a genuine technological edge over incumbents still running decade-old systems. This is a wide-surface, high-autonomy role. The first week is concrete: search, filtering, and product images. The next two years are open-ended: architecture, automation, data structuring, and integrations. You will not be handed a backlog of well-specified tickets - you'll be expected to look at high-level business problems and bring back solutions. The role suits someone who wants to own a system, not maintain one.

About the Product

The platform serves the Nordic dental distribution market - dental clinics ordering from large supplier catalogues, with the full lifecycle from browsing to fulfilment. It works and it sells, but it's deliberately lean: very little custom code today, mostly default WooCommerce, with a simple daily stock-import script behind it. That's the point. The interesting work is ahead, not behind:

• Search that actually returns what buyers are looking for (today it too often returns nothing, or the wrong thing)

• Real supplier integrations to replace manual and script-based stock/cost updates

• A pricing engine that serves many customer groups, each with different prices and discounts off a base cost

• Fulfilment automation across the order-to-supplier-to-customer flow

Technology Stack: WordPress / WooCommerce on a dedicated Linux VPS. MySQL for the data layer. PHP for custom components. REST for external connections. Git for version control. The stack is practical, not glamorous - but the engineering problem is real: you're operating and extending a data-and-commerce system at catalogue scale, not theming a store.

What You'll Be Doing

• Own the search, filtering, and sorting layer across an 80,000+ product catalogue - improving relevance and discoverability for B2B buyers

• Structure and work with large datasets - products, customers, purchasing behaviour, logistics - and turn them into something queryable and useful

• Drive database and query optimisation to handle large catalogue workloads and WooCommerce performance under real load

• Build and extend supplier integrations: stock sync, cost sync, pricing engines - replacing manual intervention with automation

• Harden the order-to-fulfilment flow - order processing, supplier handoff, payment flow - with better error handling and monitoring

• Build the multi-segment pricing logic: different customer groups, different prices and discounts off a shared base cost

• Evaluate and influence architectural decisions - search platforms, headless options, data services, AI-assisted workflows - and decide when (and whether) the current stack should evolve

What We Expect

We've deliberately kept the hard requirements loose. Years of experience don't matter to us - we've seen brilliant 25-year-olds and we've seen 50-year-olds who couldn't deliver. A strong junior with the right head can do this; so can a seasoned senior. What matters is the thinking.

Non-negotiable

• 5+ years of backend / full-stack engineering, with PHP and MySQL among your working tools

• Strong analytical and structural thinking - you can take a large, messy dataset and impose order on it

• Genuine independence - you bring solutions to high-level problems and don't need daily instructions to make progress

• Comfort in a Linux server environment - deployment, debugging, administration

• REST API design and integration

• Git

Strong plus

• Experience with large-scale e-commerce catalogues (tens of thousands of SKUs, complex pricing)

• Search technology exposure - Elasticsearch, Solr, Algolia, or similar

• ERP or supplier integration work

• Background processing / job queue architecture

• Data processing and pipeline experience

• WooCommerce / WordPress familiarity

Why This Role Is Worth Your Time

• Ownership from day one. No legacy engineering team, no committee approvals, no process bureaucracy. You inherit a working platform and take it forward on your own terms.

• The business problem is genuinely interesting. Dental distribution sounds narrow, but the real challenges - supplier data quality, catalogue management at scale, pricing logic, fulfilment automation - are engineering problems most e-commerce work glosses over.

• Room to grow into technical leadership. As the founder steps back from hands-on technical work, this role progressively absorbs that ownership. The direction is real, though the pace and scope follow the business - as the company grows, so does what this role can become.

• Direct access to decision-makers. Small team, shared context, real influence over where the product goes.