Robson Bale
Senior Production Support Engineer – PHP
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Senior Production Support Engineer – PHP
Salary: £70,000–£85,000 + generous on-call allowance (£500 per on-call week), additional call-out payments and enhanced public holiday rates
Working Pattern: Hybrid
We're looking for an experienced Senior Production Support Engineer with strong commercial PHP experience to join a highly technical Application Operations team.
This is a hands-on engineering role focused on solving complex problems across business-critical production applications. You'll combine software engineering skills with production support expertise to improve reliability, automate repetitive operational work and prevent recurring incidents.
You'll work closely with Software Engineering, Platform and SRE teams across a modern AWS and Kubernetes environment.
Core technologies include PHP, AWS (EKS/Kubernetes), MySQL, Datadog, Kibana, and Heap.
The Role
You'll be responsible for investigating and resolving complex application and platform issues, with the autonomy to safely remediate production incidents and reduce unnecessary escalation to development teams.
A major focus will be identifying opportunities to automate repetitive operational tasks, improve observability, and ultimately reduce the time engineers spend firefighting recurring issues.
You'll also:
- Troubleshoot complex production issues across PHP applications, cloud infrastructure, databases, and integrations.
- Support PHP services running within AWS and Kubernetes (EKS).
- Investigate incidents and perform safe production remediation, deployments, and rollbacks.
- Use Datadog, Kibana, and Heap to diagnose problems, understand customer impact, and improve service health.
- Work with MySQL, including query analysis, troubleshooting, and performance investigation.
- Build scripts, automation, tooling, and runbooks to reduce operational effort and improve MTTR.
- Perform root cause analysis and help implement permanent solutions to recurring problems.
- Partner with Software Engineering, SRE, and Platform teams to improve application reliability and observability.
- Contribute to service onboarding, post-incident reviews, and operational readiness.
- Drive continuous improvements across production services and engineering processes.
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What We're Looking For
You'll ideally come from a Production Support, Application Operations, Application Support, Production Engineering, or SRE background where you've supported complex, business-critical applications.
You'll need:
- Strong commercial PHP experience – essential.
- Experience supporting applications within live production environments.
- Strong troubleshooting and diagnostic skills with the ability to investigate systems end-to-end.
- Experience supporting cloud-hosted applications within AWS.
- Practical Kubernetes / EKS knowledge, including deployments, logging, monitoring, and safe rollbacks.
- Strong MySQL experience, including performance investigation and query analysis.
- Experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog, alongside log-analysis tooling such as Kibana.
- Experience building automation, scripts, or tooling to improve operational efficiency.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively across multiple engineering teams.
- A genuine interest in automation, reliability, and continuous improvement.
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Nice to Have
Experience with any of the following would be beneficial:
- Python development.
- AWS services including S3, SQS, ALB, and CloudWatch.
- Feature flag platforms.
- Configuration-as-code.
- Heap or similar product analytics tooling.
- SLOs and service reliability practices.
- Service onboarding and operational readiness.
Why Join?
This isn't a traditional ticket-driven support position.
You'll be joining an engineering-led environment where the emphasis is on understanding why problems happen, automating repetitive work, and permanently improving production reliability.
You'll work across software engineering, PHP, AWS, Kubernetes, and production operations, giving you the opportunity to broaden your expertise across Production Engineering and SRE while remaining hands-on with application code.
If you're a Production Support Engineer with strong PHP skills, or a PHP Software Engineer with significant experience troubleshooting and supporting live production applications, we'd be keen to hear from you.
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