Lead / Staff Fullstack (PHP+JS) - Web Performance Engineer

About the company

Join one of the TOP 2 global leaders in sports and betting affiliate marketing. The company’s platform serves over a billion visits a year across more than 100 countries and works with over 50 international clients. You’ll be working on global, high-traffic products designed with an emphasis on performance, scalability and code quality.

This isn’t a startup still searching for product-market fit, nor a business just maintaining legacy systems. It’s a profitable company investing significantly to transform an already successful platform. It’s currently building up its engineering hub in Bratislava, so you’re arriving at a moment when the team and technical standards are still taking shape, and you have a real chance to influence them.

About the role

We’re looking for a staff fullstack engineer to join the Gaming division and own web performance and architecture on its comparison platform. You’ll be the “why is the site slow and how do we make it fast” person. You won’t just be “picking up tickets” — you’ll be:

• running technical audits and deciding what’s worth fixing, improving or modernising,
• designing architecture and owning complex technical decisions rather than inheriting existing approaches,
• setting engineering standards and raising the technical bar across teams,
• mentoring colleagues and reducing the team’s dependence on principal engineers from other teams.

The role combines hands-on coding with technical leadership. Most of the work is technical optimisation: Core Web Vitals, page weight, response times, caching and architecture. Alongside that you’ll deliver new features aligned with the future product direction. The platform is being re-architected into a white-labelled, multi-tenant product using Domain-Driven Design.

Your impact

• Your solutions will run on a platform with over a billion visits a year
• You’ll directly influence how fast and reliable the experience is for players across 100+ countries
• You’ll shape the architecture of the next-generation multi-tenant platform
• You’ll help scale AI-assisted engineering workflows and move the organisation towards a more product-focused way of working

What you’ll do

• Conducting technical audits to identify performance bottlenecks across frontend and backend
• Leading optimisation initiatives — Core Web Vitals, page rendering, page weight, response times, caching strategies
• Designing and building scalable, multi-tenant platform capabilities
• Modernising legacy parts of the platform and simplifying architecture incrementally
• Delivering new features in partnership with Product and Engineering
• Deciding on technical direction — what to refactor, what to rewrite, what to leave alone
• Improving observability and monitoring
• Code review, mentoring and setting engineering standards across teams
• Challenging technical approaches and working with stakeholders to find the right solution

Tech stack

(the stack you’ll work in day to day — not a requirement; PHP/JS experience is an advantage)

Backend: PHP (Laravel / Symfony)

Frontend: JavaScript / TypeScript, Vue / Nuxt, React / Next.js

UI: HTML, CSS, SCSS, Tailwind

CMS: Contentful

Cloud & operations: AWS, CI/CD, observability and monitoring

Requirements

• Staff level (strong senior) — someone who still codes and sets technical direction
• Fullstack profile — you work on both backend and frontend
• Strong HTML & CSS (the only strict technology requirement — apart from that we’re tech stack agnostic)
• Architectural experience — your own technical decisions and direction
• Experience building and maintaining large-scale B2C / consumer-facing web applications
• Strong understanding of web performance optimisation — Core Web Vitals, page rendering, caching strategies, application architecture
• Experience conducting technical audits and translating findings into practical engineering improvements
• A product engineering mindset, balancing technical quality with customer and business outcomes
• Confidence working within legacy systems and improving them incrementally
• Strong communication skills and English (international team)

We don’t judge seniority purely by years worked, but by the quality of technical decisions, project complexity, ability to collaborate and actual hands-on level.

Nice to have

• PHP (Laravel / Symfony) and React / Vue — an advantage, as this is the day-to-day stack
• SEO-focused or high-traffic content platforms
• AWS and observability tooling
• Experience from iGaming / sports betting
• Experience with legacy system migrations
• Multi-tenant or platform architecture
• Contentful, Tailwind

What we offer

• Salary from €5,000 per month + annual bonus
• Permanent employment
• Work on a global, high-traffic platform
• Real technical ownership at staff level — not just implementing assignments
• The chance to influence architecture and engineering standards across teams
• A combination of hands-on coding and technical leadership
• The stable backing of a profitable company that invests in growing its Bratislava team
• Flexible setup — remote from anywhere in Slovakia, hybrid or in the Bratislava office
• Office closed between Christmas and New Year — extra time off on top of your annual leave
• An international environment and global company events

Why this role is interesting

This isn’t “another fullstack job”. You’ll get a combination that’s hard to find:

• web performance at a scale of over a billion visits a year,
• a platform being re-architected into a multi-tenant product — with genuine room for technical decisions,
• influence over architecture and standards across multiple products and brands,
• and all of it in a team that’s being built right now — so your fingerprint will be visible.