Senior Backend Developer (PHP, Laravel, VueJS, Tailwind)

TLDR: Cognyx is a fast-growing, VC-backed SaaS company revolutionizing Hardware engineering for the AI era. We're seeking a Senior Backend Developer with deep expertise in Laravel (11+), relational databases, and backend development (70-80% focus), along with proficiency in VueJS and Tailwind CSS for frontend work. This is a unique opportunity to join our Tech team and contribute to groundbreaking AI-driven tech, ensuring scalability, performance, and best practices while mentoring others. “I’m in!” Apply here ⬇

📌 Location(s): ideally, mostly in-person in our Paris HQ near Bastille, with some WFH flexibility for Dev’s. Partial remote can be discussed. Full-remote not an option at our maturity stage (we highly value in-person collaboration for fast early-stage building!).

💶 Salary range: 55-75k€ + BSPCE (2nd batch, ≈ 0.4%) + intéressement bonus (up to 20% of annual salary upon reaching ARR milestones in 2025). Usual French perks. Quick salary progression, tied with fundraising and/or growth milestones.

📑 Type of Contract: French CDI (Contrat à Durée Indéterminée), usual SYNTEC branch perks.

👏 Direct reporting line: Co-Founder & CTO (Deon van der Vyver).

⏱️ Start Date: ASAP!

Cognyx Overview

Our Ambition: To empower thousands of industrial and manufacturing companies to design and engineer hardware products at software speed!

Our Mission: Cognyx develops groundbreaking SaaS technology to accelerate time-to-market, reduce manufacturing errors, and streamline engineering processes. By leveraging Knowledge Graphs and AI, Cognyx enhances engineers' daily work by reconciling Product & Engineering data across different systems, facilitating faster collaboration, and automating engineering tasks.

Our Story: Cognyx is an early-stage, VC-backed tech company founded in Sept-23 by Matthias & Deon. We're partnered with OSS Ventures, a leading startup studio with a proven track record in the Manufacturing space, including category-defining companies like Fabriq and Mercateam. After rapid sales growth and securing major contracts, Cognyx has secured significant pre-seed funding from a major VC (to be announced) and renowned angel investors.

Our Values: At Cognyx, we're driven by Team Spirit (we succeed or fail together), Excellence (we strive for the best), and Sincerity (we value honesty and transparency).

Your team: as part of our early-stage engineering team, you'll work closely with our 8-10 person Founding Team, defining our technology, culture, value proposition, and processes. You'll also interact with our offshore development and DevOps teams. You'll report to Deon, our CTO, a seasoned founder with 25 years of tech leadership experience.

Learn More: Visit our website, Careers @ Cognyx, or LinkedIn page. Explore our startup studio, OSS Ventures.

Why Cognyx Needs You

Cognyx is a powerful platform addressing complex organizational and engineering challenges. Unlike off-the-shelf SaaS solutions, our strength lies in our deep understanding of hardware engineering, manufacturing data structures, and end-to-end workflows. We don't just analyze current processes: we envision and build future-state solutions that break down silos and overcome legacy limitations.

We need talented individuals to help drive this vision. You’ll be instrumental in designing and maintaining our backend infrastructure, optimizing relational databases, and ensuring the scalability and performance of our platform. As part of our engineering team, you’ll shape technical decisions, mentor developers, and explore AI-driven innovations.

What You’ll Do

Role Overview

As a Senior Backend Developer at Cognyx, you'll be crucial in building and maintaining scalable backend systems using Laravel, focusing on performance, security, and maintainability. While primarily backend-focused (70-80%), you'll also work with VueJS and Tailwind CSS for frontend support when needed. Your expertise in relational databases is vital for efficient data structures and system reliability. You'll contribute to code reviews, unit testing (PHPUnit, Pest), and API development, ensuring a high-quality codebase. You’ll also mentor junior developers, share knowledge, and explore AI-driven innovations to enhance our platform.

Strong focus on backend (80%) and some frontend (20%) using Laravel 11+ with VueJS and Tailwind CSS. We seek an experienced developer with 8+ years of backend experience and a deep understanding of Laravel best practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain backend services using PHP (Laravel), ensuring high performance and scalability.
• Implement and optimize database structures in relational databases.
• Ensure Laravel best practices (security, performance, maintainability).
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams for seamless user experiences.
• Conduct code reviews.
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs.
• Write and maintain unit tests.
• Debug and troubleshoot application issues.
• Work with VueJS and Tailwind CSS for frontend support.
• Stay updated with the latest trends in Laravel, PHP, and backend development.
• Mentor junior developers.
• Explore and integrate AI-driven solutions.

Tech Stack

• Backend: PHP, Laravel 11+
• Frontend: VueJS, Tailwind CSS
• Databases: MySQL & Postgres
• Version Control: Git/GitHub
• APIs: RESTful API development
• Tools & Methodologies: CI/CD

Bonus points!

• CQRS / ES: Experience with Event-sourcing architecture
• Graph Databases: Experience with Neo4J
• AI Technologies: Experience with or interest in AI
• Python: Experience with Python

Your profile

You’ll be successful in the role if…

We’re looking for a talented, driven and ambitious professional. We think the necessary skills to succeed are the following, by order of importance:

1. You are a Laravel expert - with deep hands-on experience in Laravel 11+, you understand how to build clean, efficient, and scalable backend architectures, following best practices and leveraging Laravel’s full ecosystem (Eloquent ORM, service providers, queues, middleware, etc.).
2. You have strong database design & optimization skills - you know how to design relational database schemas for complex systems, write performant queries, and apply indexing and caching strategies to ensure our platform runs smoothly at scale.
3. You thrive in collaborative environments - you’re not just a solo coder. You actively engage with designers, product managers, and fellow developers, contributing to a high-quality, cross-functional team dynamic. You enjoy mentoring others and raising the technical bar for the whole team.
4. You have a problem-solving mindset and ownership mentality - you approach complex technical challenges methodically, and you take ownership of your work from design to deployment, proactively identifying and resolving issues to keep systems robust and reliable.
5. You are curious about AI and innovation - you have a genuine interest in AI technologies and are excited about exploring how they can be integrated into the platform to create smarter, more efficient solutions for our users.

We kindly advise you to turn back if…

• You are not ready for the startup journey - working in an early-stage startup means embracing uncertainty, wearing multiple hats, and being comfortable with rapid changes. We need team members who are energized by this environment, not drained by it.
• You prefer to work only on frontend or avoid backend-heavy roles - this role is 70–80% backend, and requires deep expertise in backend development and architecture.
• You shy away from ownership and accountability - we value developers who take end-to-end ownership of their solutions, from conception to deployment and maintenance.
• You are not interested in continuous learning or emerging technologies - we embrace innovation, including exploring AI-driven enhancements, and expect our team to stay curious and forward-thinking.
• You’re not fully comfortable working in English (our team is international from day 1 and English is our official language). French will be a plus, though!

Application & Interview Process

1. Quick intro call on role scope and fit with your career goals (30 min visio, with CTO or CEO)
2. Deep-Dive into your career & past achievements (1.5hr F2F, with CTO)
3. Technical assessment & pair programming: small coding exercise based on a real-world problem using Laravel, followed by code review discussion (2hrs, with Tech Team)
4. Final cultural fit & wrap-up discussion (45 min, with CEO)
5. Reference check (2-3 calls – NB: this goes both ways and you can talk to our team!)