Senior Backend Engineer

Element451 · Engineering Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students — and the backend is the engine that makes it work. You’ll build the services, data models, and integrations that move millions of student interactions through a multi-tenant, async-first platform, with AI woven into the product itself. It’s a rare chance to own meaningful systems end to end, treat AI as a real craft rather than a buzzword, and help shape how a high-performing team builds software in the AI era. If you want your work to matter, your judgment to carry real weight, and your skills to keep growing alongside people who care deeply about the craft, you’ll feel at home here. THE ROLE You’ll build high-quality backend software with full end-to-end ownership — from shaping a feature in planning through keeping it stable in production. This is an explicitly AI-forward role: AI tooling is a professional discipline here, applied thoughtfully across every phase of the work, not a shortcut for generating code. Senior Engineers operate with a lot of autonomy, hold their work to a high standard, and lift the quality of the work happening around them. We hold a high bar — and we give you the ownership, context, and support to meet it. We’re upfront about expectations because the engineers who thrive here tend to want exactly that kind of environment. WHAT YOU’LL OWN You own the services you ship — their correctness, stability, security, and maintainability — from the first design conversation until they’re live and working well for real users. We consider a feature delivered when it has been validated before release, rolled out safely, and shown through production monitoring to meet its correctness, performance, and reliability expectations. Day to day, that looks like: - Designing and building backend services in PHP/Laravel — clear domain boundaries, well-structured code, and business logic that stays understandable as the platform grows. - Owning the data layer: MongoDB schema and index design for multi-tenant workloads, query performance under real data volumes, and migrations that ship safely without downtime. - Building async, event-driven work that holds up — SQS-based queues, jobs, and retries designed for idempotency, backpressure, and graceful failure rather than best-case throughput. - Owning the API contracts you publish — including deliberate schema evolution, backward compatibility, deprecation planning, and coordination with downstream consumers. A breaking change is your problem to plan for, not the caller’s to discover. - Designing for secure tenant isolation, authorization boundaries, sensitive-data handling, auditability, secrets management, and applicable privacy requirements across services, integrations, logs, and AI-assisted workflows. - Implementing and operating third-party integrations (Twilio, Stripe, PayPal, Google, Outlook, and the SIS/CRM…