Backend Engineer
The Role
Your job is to take ownership of that platform, stabilise it, and then evolve it from a functional commerce stack into a genuine technological edge over incumbents still running decade-old systems. This is a wide-surface, high-autonomy role. The first week is concrete: search, filtering, and product images. The next two years are open-ended: architecture, automation, data structuring, and integrations. You will not be handed a backlog of well-specified tickets — you’ll be expected to look at high-level business problems and bring back solutions. The role suits someone who wants to own a system, not maintain one.
About the Product
The platform serves the Nordic dental distribution market — dental clinics ordering from large supplier catalogues, with the full lifecycle from browsing to fulfilment. It works and it sells, but it’s deliberately lean: very little custom code today, mostly default WooCommerce, with a simple daily stock-import script behind it. That’s the point. The interesting work is ahead, not behind:
- Search that actually returns what buyers are looking for (today it too often returns nothing, or the wrong thing)
- Real supplier integrations to replace manual and script-based stock/cost updates
- A pricing engine that serves many customer groups, each with different prices and discounts off a base cost
- Fulfilment automation across the order-to-supplier-to-customer flow
Technology Stack: WordPress / WooCommerce on a dedicated Linux VPS. MySQL for the data layer. PHP for custom components. REST for external connections. Git for version control. The stack is practical, not glamorous — but the engineering problem is real: you’re operating and extending a data-and-commerce system at catalogue scale, not theming a store.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Own the search, filtering, and sorting layer across an 80,000+ product catalogue — improving relevance and discoverability for B2B buyers
- Structure and work with large datasets — products, customers, purchasing behaviour, logistics — and turn them into something queryable and useful
- Drive database and query optimisation to handle large catalogue workloads and WooCommerce performance under real load
- Build and extend supplier integrations: stock sync, cost sync, pricing engines — replacing manual intervention with automation
- Harden the order-to-fulfilment flow — order processing, supplier handoff, payment flow — with better error handling and monitoring
- Build the multi-segment pricing logic: different customer groups, different prices and discounts off a shared base cost
- Evaluate and influence architectural decisions — search platforms, headless options, data services, AI-assisted workflows — and decide when (and whether) the current stack should evolve
What We Expect
We’ve deliberately kept the hard requirements loose. Years of experience don’t matter to us — we’ve seen brilliant 25-year-olds and we’ve seen 50-year-olds who couldn’t deliver. A strong junior with the right head can do this; so can a seasoned senior. What matters is the thinking.
Non-negotiable
- 5+ years of backend / full-stack engineering, with PHP and MySQL among your working tools
- Strong analytical and structural thinking — you can take a large, messy dataset and impose order on it
- Genuine independence — you bring solutions to high-level problems and don’t need daily instructions to make progress
- Comfort in a Linux server environment — deployment, debugging, administration
- REST API design and integration
- Git
Strong plus
- Experience with large-scale e-commerce catalogues (tens of thousands of SKUs, complex pricing)
- Search technology exposure — Elasticsearch, Solr, Algolia, or similar
- ERP or supplier integration work
- Background processing / job queue architecture
- Data processing and pipeline experience
- WooCommerce / WordPress familiarity
Why This Role Is Worth Your Time
- Ownership from day one. No legacy engineering team, no committee approvals, no process bureaucracy. You inherit a working platform and take it forward on your own terms.
- The business problem is genuinely interesting. Dental distribution sounds narrow, but the real challenges — supplier data quality, catalogue management at scale, pricing logic, fulfilment automation — are engineering problems most e-commerce work glosses over.
- Room to grow into technical leadership. As the founder steps back from hands-on technical work, this role progressively absorbs that ownership. The direction is real, though the pace and scope follow the business — as the company grows, so does what this role can become.
- Direct access to decision-makers. Small team, shared context, real influence over where the product goes.