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
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.
