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Michele Imperato

@micheleimperato

Senior Backend Engineer & Technical Lead · 8 yrs PHP / Adobe Commerce · APIs, integrations, architecture · AI-assisted engineering

Italy

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What I'm looking for

Fully remote, permanent employee role from Italy as a Senior Backend Engineer, Tech Lead or Software Architect. Most experienced in PHP (8 years, mainly Adobe Commerce, plus Symfony), open to other backend stacks. Interested in APIs, integrations and architecture at product-focused companies. Employment via a local Italian entity or an Employer of Record works for me.

Senior Backend Engineer and Technical & Team Lead with 8 years of experience designing, building and running large-scale PHP e-commerce systems on Adobe Commerce (Magento 2), one of the largest enterprise PHP codebases.

I lead a team of developers across multiple concurrent projects, owning architecture, code quality and delivery, and I stay hands-on in development.

What I work on:

- Software architecture: microservices-oriented modular design, dependency injection, API contracts, event-driven extension points

- APIs and integrations: REST and GraphQL, PIM catalog imports, payment and shipping providers, asynchronous processing with RabbitMQ

- Performance on high-traffic stores: efficient code and SQL, caching (Redis / Valkey, Varnish / Fastly), search (OpenSearch / Elasticsearch)

- Code quality: TDD, PHPUnit, static analysis (PHPStan, PHPCS, PHPMD), code reviews, GitLab CI/CD

- Development environment: I own and maintain the team's Docker Compose development environment end to end

AI-assisted engineering: I brought agentic AI coding (Claude Code) into my team's daily workflow and set it up for the whole team, with a shared toolkit of agent instructions, project-context files, task-lifecycle commands, custom sub-agents and skills, tuned for output quality and token efficiency. I use it every day in my own development work; among other things, I packaged Claude Code in a sandboxed Docker Compose container, integrated into our development environment.

Career: Magento Developer at MageSpecialist (2018–2021, acquired by Adiacent), Senior Backend Developer at Adiacent (2021–2025), Technical & Team Leader at Adiacent since 2025. Fully remote since 2021.

2× Adobe Commerce certified: Adobe Certified Expert and Adobe Certified Professional – Adobe Commerce Developer.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Tech & Team Leader / Software Architect

Current

Adiacent

Sep 2025 - Present (1 year 1 month)

Technical lead for Adobe Commerce projects, still hands-on in development.
- Lead a team of developers across multiple concurrent projects.
- Own solution architecture (microservices-oriented modular design, integrations, scalability, security) and code quality (code reviews, TDD, CI/CD).
- Brought agentic AI coding (Claude Code) into the team's workflow; own the team's Docker Compose dev env.

Senior Backend Developer

Adiacent

Jun 2021 - Sep 2025 (4 years 3 months)

Backend development on Adobe Commerce for high-traffic B2C, B2B and multi-vendor stores.
- REST/GraphQL APIs in PHP 8 with TDD (PHPUnit).
- Integrations (PIM, payments, shipping, email, analytics) with RabbitMQ and background workers.
- Performance: efficient code and SQL, caching (Redis, Varnish / Fastly), search (OpenSearch).
- Ported an Akeneo catalog import from Magento to Shopware (Symfony).