PHP Developer

**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**

Our Values

Driven by PLAYER OBSESSION, we earn our players’ trust by understanding their needs and creating experiences that put them first.

OWNERSHIP means we take responsibility for our work and outcomes — we follow through, learn from mistakes, and never say “that’s not my job.”

With RESOURCEFULNESS, we do more with less, finding creative ways to overcome challenges and deliver impactful results.

Grounded in CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, we are relentless in our pursuit of better — for ourselves, our games, and our players.

The Opportunity

Kano (https://www.kano.ca/) is looking for a talented, passionate, and experienced Senior Developer to join our Xwars Team. You will be instrumental in building, delivering, and scaling high-volume social and mobile gaming experiences, ensuring performance and stability for millions of players worldwide.

What You’ll Do:

• Full-Stack Development & Delivery: Design, implement, test, deploy, and maintain robust, high-availability, large-scale social and mobile game features in a fast-paced, agile development environment (Kanban/Scrum).
• Performance Optimization: Take ownership of game performance optimization, dealing with issues like profiling, memory, CPU, and load times to ensure an amazing experience across millions of devices.
• Infrastructure & Systems: Create and support robust underlying infrastructure and systems that the games team can lean on.
• Collaboration & Expertise: Effectively collaborate with product, creative, and development teams (artists, designers, analysts) to plan and execute development and releases. Assert technical know-how to solve complex platform problems.
• Code Quality & Best Practices: Write efficient, organized, and maintainable code within complex codebases. Contribute to best practices on performance, reliability, architecture, and modern software design principles.
• Monitoring & Support: Monitor game dashboards, logs, and metrics to ensure the code is working seamlessly, ensuring our 24/7 player base can play uninterrupted and bug-free.
• AI-Augmented Development: Proactively leverage AI frameworks and LLM-based coding assistants (e.g., Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate development cycles, automate boilerplate, and perform initial code reviews, ensuring a high-velocity output without sacrificing quality.

What You Bring:

• 5+ years of recent, relevant software development experience.
• Full-Stack Proficiency: Expertise in both PHP and JavaScript in a full-stack environment.
• Web Technologies: Experience with large-scale web development and HTML5/JS applications. Skilled in front-end development, including core web technologies (JSON, AJAX, CSS).
• OOP & Architecture: Strong understanding of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and modern software design principles. Ability to write clean, maintainable code and design large components and features.
• High-Volume Systems: Experience creating and supporting products that serve thousands of people concurrently with ease, particularly in high-availability, scalable systems.
• Database Experience: Expert knowledge of databases, including MySQL and MongoDB.
• Source Control: Proficient with source control systems; Git mastery is a strong plus.
• Performance Focus: A performance-driven mindset and a strong ability to write efficient software and optimize existing code.
• The "Ownership" Mindset: A track record of not just finishing tickets, but identifying technical debt and performance bottlenecks in legacy systems and proposing/implementing long-term solutions.
• Modern Tooling Mastery: Proven ability to integrate AI-assisted workflows (Codex, Claude, etc.) into your daily development process to increase efficiency and solve complex debugging tasks faster.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in the games industry or working on a SaaS product.
• Experience with game optimization techniques.
• Experience with AWS or other cloud infrastructure/services.
• Experience with production continuous integration (CI), build pipelines, and automated testing.
• Working knowledge or strong experience with Unix/Linux environments.
• Experience with native mobile platforms (Objective-C/Swift for iOS, Java for Android) or cross-platform tools like Apache Cordova/Phonegap.

Salary Range: ($100,000 - $120,000)
The listed range reflects potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation depends on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs. Most candidates can expect to fall near the midpoint of the range.