Senior Full Stack Engineer in Phoenix, Arizona at GradGuard

About GradGuard

As the leader in college tuition and renters insurance, GradGuard serves more than 1.7 million students across 1,900+ institutions.

Our national technology platform embeds innovative insurance protections into the enrollment processes of over 700 institutional partners, empowering schools to increase college completion rates and reduce the financial impact of preventable losses.

GradGuard supports College Life Protected, a social purpose entity that promotes research, professional development, and best practices that strengthen campus communities, families, society and the economic competitiveness of our nation.

GradGuard was recognized as one of the Top 50 Financial Technology Companies of 2025 by The Financial Technology Report, a RISE Internship Award winner, and a Phoenix Business Journal Best Places to Work finalist, GradGuard remains committed to innovation, excellence, and supporting students and families.

Hear from our students, families, and partners: https://www.youtube.com/@GradGuard

About the role

GradGuard’s Technology team works hard, moves fast, and has each other’s backs. As we step into an exciting new phase of growth, we’re looking for an experienced Senior Full Stack Engineer that’s ready to take ownership, push boundaries, and build something meaningful. You'll spend most of your time in PHP/Laravel services built on event-sourced, event-driven patterns, working within financial workflows where data consistency and security aren't optional, including integrations with payment processing platforms like Stripe. You'll also build and consume both REST and GraphQL APIs, and bring it all to life on the frontend with Vue 3, Nuxt, and TypeScript.

The ideal candidate for this role is a proactive, inventive professional who thrives in a collaborative environment and is committed to building high quality, efficient, scalable, and impactful software solutions. This role requires a strong analytical mindset, excellent teamwork, desire to collaborate, and the ability to effectively communicate complex insights to stakeholders at all levels.

What you'll do

• Architect, implement, and support PHP/Laravel backend services, prioritizing data consistency, security and performance within event-sourced financial frameworks.
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams (including product and design) to develop sites from scratch or enhance existing websites and software to meet business requirements.
• Develop, implement, and support features with quality and performance utilizing PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
• Write automated unit, functional, and end-to-end tests to support both feature development and bug fixes.
• Provide code recommendations and design optimizations to improve the usability, scalability, and performance of the applications, and drive adoption.
• Assist in sharing, servicing, and mentoring our existing web engineering team.
• Deeply understand technical details of owned features and their interactions with other systems.

Qualifications

• At least 5+ years of software engineering industry experience.
• Advanced experience with PHP MVC frameworks, preferably Laravel.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, including asynchronous, queue-driven processing (e.g., Laravel Jobs/Queues or equivalent).
• Experience with event-sourcing architecture and libraries.
• Experience working with modern front-end technologies, like Vue3, Nuxt, TypeScript and Tailwind.
• Experience with unit, integration and end-to-end testing.
• Experience collaborating and working with cross-functional teams (including product and design).
• Strong knowledge of object-oriented programming design patterns.
• Advanced experience with relational or non-relational databases, such as MySQL, and MongoDB.
• Experience in building and consuming both REST and GraphQL APIs.
• Experience integrating with payment processing APIs, such as Stripe.

Nice to Have Qualifications

• Experience with JavaScript build tools, such as Vite.
• Ability to create, support, and enhance front-end component libraries.
• Enjoy making the team better via mentorship and experience.