Backend Team Lead (PHP/Node.js)

About the role

Delasport is where technology meets the excitement of sports and gaming! As a leading powerhouse in iGaming software, we provide everything from sports betting to online casinos and player account management. Our platform is designed to make every player feel like the star of the show, with personalized experience and cutting-edge technology at its heart. Since 2010, we've made a significant impact in industry, earning awards and expanding our global presence. With offices in Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Malta, our team of over 500 experts is constantly driving innovation and striving for excellence. We're hiring a Team Lead for one of the most consequential engineering teams at Delasport - the team that owns KYC, AML, anti-fraud, and regulatory compliance across the platform. These aren't peripheral services. They're what makes it legally possible for our operators to take a bet in every market we're licensed in. Every player who signs up, every withdrawal, every suspicious pattern, every regulator report - it flows through systems your team owns. When a new jurisdiction comes online, your team is on the critical path. If you want a leadership role where the work is technically real, the stakes are visible, and the autonomy is genuine - read on. This role is based in Sofia, Bulgaria and we welcome candidates who are open to relocating (relocation support provided). What Your Team Owns You'll lead a team of 5 full-stack developers and 2 QAs responsible for: KYC - identity verification pipelines, document checks, and third-party provider integrations AML - transaction monitoring, sanctions and PEP screening, suspicious-activity detection Anti-Fraud - behavioural analysis and fraud-pattern detection across player activity Regulatory Compliance - jurisdiction-specific rules, reporting obligations, and operator configurations The footprint is a mix of synchronous APIs, scheduled jobs, and real-time stream consumers processing events off Kafka and RabbitMQ. What You'll Actually Work On Shaping the future stack . Today the team works across PHP/Laravel, Python, and TypeScript/Vue. All new services will be written in Node.js, and you'll be a key voice in shaping how that evolution unfolds - patterns, shared libraries, deployment standards. Driving technical excellence . Setting and raising the bar on performance, reliability, and operational maturity across the team's services. Real ownership of production . The team owns its services end to end - design, build, ship, observe, fix. You set the standard for how that ownership is exercised. Growing the team . Seniors ready to push toward staff-level work; mids ready to grow into seniors. Your impact on them will be one of the most rewarding parts of this role.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team . Set technical direction, code-quality bar, and architectural standards. Run code reviews that teach. Develop the engineers under you.
• Stay hands-on . This is not a pure people-management role. You'll write code, design systems, and pair on hard problems.
• Architect for the real world . Design services that handle real-time event streams reliably, fail safely under regulatory scrutiny, and integrate cleanly with the third-party providers we depend on.
• Drive the technical roadmap . Make and defend the calls on what to refactor, what to rewrite, and where to invest the team's time.
• Partner across the org . Work closely with Product, DevOps, Data, and the Compliance/Legal side of the business - the last of which is unusual for an engineering role and one of the more interesting parts of the job.
• Employees may be required to participate in an on-call rotation, ensuring availability outside regular working hours to respond to urgent issues as needed as per the On call policy.
• Why This Role Is Different
• High business impact . When KYC breaks, players can't deposit. When AML breaks, we have a regulatory problem. The work matters and people know it.
• Polyglot by design, not by accident . PHP, Python, TypeScript today; Node.js for everything new. If you're tired of being pigeonholed in one language, this team doesn't do that.
• Genuine ownership . Your team owns its services end to end. No throwing things over the wall.
• Regulated-domain depth . You'll learn how iGaming compliance actually works at the engineering level - a specialisation that's genuinely valuable and surprisingly rare on the market.

Requirements

• Experience : 7+ years building backend systems in PHP, including 2+ years leading a team or operating as a senior technical lead.
• Core technical strength :
• Strong PHP and OOP fundamentals - design patterns, clean architecture, testability.
• Production experience with Laravel (or strong Symfony experience and the willingness to ramp on Laravel).
• Comfortable working with event-driven systems - Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent. You've built and operated consumers, not just published a message once.
• Solid grasp of relational databases (M

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