Senior Full Stack PHP Engineer (AI-First)

• $170k-$200k base + super
• Build and scale a healthcare platform using AI-first engineering
• Hybrid role

At vital.ly, our engineering scope is broad and complex.

Externally, our proprietary customer platform supports over 14,000 healthcare practitioners. It enables wholesale ordering for clinic dispensaries, advanced prescribing workflows with built-in clinical safety features, and digital prescriptions sent directly to patients for online fulfilment - all powered by Australia’s most comprehensive complementary medicine reference tools.

Internally, the proprietary platform is the backbone of our distribution business, turning prescriptions into deliveries. It provides customised workflows and tools that manage practitioner access, inventory, orders, and reference content as well as protect patient data - making this ecosystem uniquely powerful.

Connecting every part, internal and external APIs ensure seamless integration, while AWS infrastructure delivers security, resilience, and scalability.

This role sits at the centre of how we evolve that platform.

As a Senior Engineer (AI-First), you’ll work directly with the Head of Engineering and founding engineers to migrate a legacy system into a Laravel-based architecture - while using AI agent workflows to accelerate development without compromising correctness or quality.

This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys system ownership, deep technical problem solving, and working at the edge of how software is built.

Who this role is for:

This role will suit a senior engineer who is both technically strong and comfortable working in an AI-assisted development environment.

You have strong backend experience in PHP/Laravel and are confident working in production systems with real complexity. You understand how to design and build modular systems, work with APIs, and own functionality end-to-end.

You are comfortable using AI tools as part of your workflow — not just for generation, but for structuring problems, validating outputs, and improving development speed without sacrificing quality.

You think in systems, not just features. You care about correctness, edge cases, and ensuring that what gets built behaves exactly as intended — especially when working with legacy migrations.

You take ownership of what you build. That includes how it performs in production, how it behaves under load, and how it evolves over time.

You are detail-oriented and comfortable working through complex logic, ambiguous requirements, and deeply embedded business rules.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES

Phase 1 (Legacy Migration)

• Make architectural decisions that align with the overall platform architecture, including module boundaries, service contracts, data ownership, and API design.
• Direct AI-assisted development workflows (including agent-based tooling) to rebuild modules in Laravel.
• Review AI-generated code for correctness against the original system.
• Ensure AI-generated outputs conform to defined rules, constraints, and architectural standards.
• Validate parity tests that prove old and new code produce identical results.
• Maintain migration tracking documentation (e.g. TODO.md, MIGRATION_QA.md) accurately and consistently.
• Work closely with founding engineers to confirm intent behind edge cases, implicit logic, and historical system behaviour.
• Ensure data integrity and correctness across all migrated modules, particularly in edge cases and historical data scenarios.

Phase 2 (Platform Expansion)

• Design and build new platform features on the migrated architecture.
• Own the behaviour of your modules in production, including monitoring, debugging, and resolving issues as they arise — across service layer, API, and frontend.
• Identify and address performance bottlenecks, ensuring systems are efficient and scalable under production workloads.
• Maintain high standards of code quality, consistency, and maintainability across both AI-generated and manually written code.
• Contribute to technical direction and architectural decisions as the platform evolves.
• Actively contribute to platform direction through proposing, evaluating, and implementing technical solutions.

REQUIREMENTS

Must haves:

• Experience working with AI-assisted or agentic development workflows, including generating, reviewing, and validating AI-produced code, and defining constraints or rules for AI systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience in PHP/Laravel, including building and maintaining production systems (queues, jobs, scheduling, caching, and event-driven architecture).
• Architecture-level engineering experience, including API design, modular monoliths, and contract/event-driven architecture.
• Strong understanding of reactive front-end frameworks, including state management, reactivity, and component abstraction.
• Production experience with AWS infrastructure, including ECS, RDS, CloudFront, EC2, Secrets Manager, and CloudWatch.
• Strong engineering fundamentals, including debugging complex systems, ensuring data integrity, and working with production-scale applications.
• This is a permanent, full-time role and requires unrestricted and ongoing work rights in Australia.

Nice to have:

• Experience with Postgres data architecture.
• Understanding of CDC processes and MySQL bin_log handlers.
• Experience with OpenSearch.
• Experience with pgvector or semantic search implementation/optimisation.
• Experience with PostgreSQL full-text search optimisation (tsvector).
• Experience with C#.

About vital.ly

vital.ly is the infrastructure behind sustainable clinical practice. Trusted by over 14,000 practitioners across Australia, vital.ly integrates three pillars of infrastructure — technology platform, distribution capability, and practitioner expertise — to transform how clinics prescribe and dispense complementary medicines.

Through vital.ly, practitioners can access wholesale ordering from leading brands, dispense prescriptions digitally, and use advanced prescribing tools with built-in clinical safety tools. Every order is fulfilled through our own dedicated warehouse, with fulfilment operations designed for speed, accuracy, and scale. Behind it all is a team of qualified practitioners and experienced professionals who provide the support and guidance needed to practice with confidence.

Joining vital.ly means becoming part of a business that empowers practitioners, improves patient outcomes, and drives innovation in complementary medicine.

*Please no recruiters and agencies. We are filling this role in-house.*