Principal Full Stack Engineer

About the role

We are an established enterprise e‑commerce business seeking a Principal Full Stack Engineer to own the architecture, hosting infrastructure, and overall engineering direction of our platform. This senior, hands‑on position reports directly to the business owner and will initially be the sole engineer responsible for the platform’s technical health.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop, and evolve a CodeIgniter‑based e‑commerce platform across the full stack, from MySQL schema to Bootstrap UI and Node.js components.
• Configure, secure, and optimise the hosting environment on Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud SQL.
• Write and maintain NGINX configurations, including virtual hosts, SSL/TLS, reverse proxying, caching, rate limiting and performance tuning.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues across application code, database, web server and infrastructure.
• Define engineering standards, conventions and hiring criteria as the team expands.
• Collaborate with leadership on technical roadmap, scaling decisions and platform investments.

Required profile

• 7+ years of professional full‑stack engineering experience, with substantial production work in PHP/CodeIgniter for e‑commerce or similar transactional systems.
• Strong MySQL expertise, including query optimisation, indexing, schema design and replication/backup awareness.
• Hands‑on experience with Google Cloud Platform, specifically Compute Engine and Cloud SQL.
• Proven ability to write and reason about NGINX configurations from scratch.
• Solid Node.js fluency for tooling or backend services.
• Proficiency with Bootstrap to deliver clean, responsive, accessible UI.
• Experience integrating payment processors, preferably Braintree.

Required skills

• PHP
• CodeIgniter
• Node.js
• Bootstrap
• MySQL
• Google Compute Engine
• Google Cloud SQL
• NGINX
• Braintree