Senior AI-Augmented Laravel Engineer

Location: Fully Remote (USA) Comp: $120k - $130k + Equity + Performance Bonuses

The Mission: Building the Operating System for Trade Schools

Lumion is the all-in-one operating system for trade and technical schools. We are the central platform that powers the entire institution—from the first lead generated, to enrollment, tuition payments, compliance reporting, and alumni career tracking.

We are a well-funded, high-velocity startup backed by TTV Capital and Tusk Venture Partners. We are obsessed with helping the next generation of tradespeople launch successful careers, and we are updating our entire stack to be AI-First.

The Role: Code at the Speed of Thought

We're hiring a Senior Engineer who is all-in on AI-native workflows. If hand-crafting every line of boilerplate PHP is a badge of honor for you, this isn't the role.

You'll treat AI agents (Claude Code, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor) as your primary toolset — an orchestrator who ships comprehensive features far faster than traditional developers, architecting the automated backbone that lets trade schools scale. You'll work across multiple projects in parallel, using AI to plan, build, test, and iterate without losing sight of quality or outcomes. This is about moving the business forward: getting valuable, working software into customers' hands as fast as possible — not slowly perfecting isolated tickets.

What we're looking for

• Outcome ownership. You own problems, not tickets — understanding the customer need, knowing why the work matters, making smart technical calls, testing what you ship, and staying accountable until it's delivering real value in the real world.

• Product thinking. You care how customers actually use what you build. You connect technical decisions to the broader product vision and turn customer problems into simple, useful software. If understanding the "why" and shaping the user experience are among your strengths, you'll thrive here.

• Judgment over vibes. Speed matters, but speed without judgment isn't enough. We're not looking for "vibe coders" who accept AI output and move on. Use AI to accelerate, then verify, refine, and simplify until the product does exactly what it should. The goal is useful software, not more code.

• Open communication. We work in the open — flag risks early, ask when the "why" is unclear, and speak up when something doesn't make sense. No surprises, no silent blockers, no unnecessary complexity.

How we work:

You're joining a high-trust, high-output team — one that's greater than the sum of its parts, because people move faster and build better when they share context openly and take ownership together. We keep our egos low and take the mission seriously.

But here's the honest part: we love this work. The building, the designing, the debugging, the problem-solving — that isn't the price we pay to get somewhere. It is the fun. We enjoy it so much that it doesn’t feel like a job. So if crafting, building, and chasing down a hard bug is genuinely how you like to spend your time — if that's what you call fun — then this is the right place.

To prove you have read this tell us in your application what you'd do with a golden banana. There are no wrong answers, except not answering.

You're not just writing code. You're building the business.

The Stack & Tooling

• Core: PHP 8.4+, Laravel 12+, Livewire, Filament

• AI Tooling (Mandatory): You must be proficient with agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Gemini, and Codex.

• Data & AI Infra: MySQL, Redis, and vector databases (pgvector/Pinecone) for RAG implementations to make school data accessible via natural language.

• Testing: Pest PHP (AI writes the tests; you verify the coverage).

What We Require (No Compromises)

• Agentic Workflow Mastery: You don’t just "use ChatGPT sometimes." AI is not your “rubbery ducky.” You have a fully developed workflow using tools like Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, etc. to generate, refactor, and debug complex codebases. You live in the AI tooling so much that you occasionally wonder why you even have an IDE installed. Your workflow should be built around orchestrating AI agents to plan, generate, refactor, test, and ship real production code quickly.

• Laravel Expertise: You know the framework deeply enough to instantly spot when the AI is hallucinating or using an anti-pattern. You can guide the AI to use Service Providers, Facades, and Eloquent correctly.

• Business Logic Intuition: You understand that we are building a mission-critical platform. You can translate complex school workflows into clean technical architecture.

• Database Design & Structure: This is the heart of it — you can take a messy, real-world problem and turn it into a clean database structure. You think in schemas: modeling a complex domain into well-normalized tables, knowing exactly when to denormalize for speed, and designing indexes that keep queries fast as tables grow into the millions of rows. You spot an N+1, a missing index, or a migration that'll lock a production table before it ships

• Shipping Mindset: You value outcomes over output. You care about the feature landing in the school administrator's hands, not the purity of the implementation process.

• 5+ Years Experience: In shipping production web applications (SaaS preferred).

Why Join Lumion Now?

• The Impact:
  Building the American Dream, One Graduate at a Time

  America is short millions of skilled workers — electricians, plumbers, nurses, technicians — the people who keep the country running. The demand is there. The students are there. What's missing is schools that can move someone from enrolled, to graduated, to hired without drowning in operational friction.

  That's the bottleneck we're removing. We're building the AI-first operating system for these institutions, and every bit of friction you engineer away is a real person who makes it to the finish line — a single parent who finally has a career instead of a paycheck-to-paycheck job, the first in their family to graduate into a real trade, someone going from "unemployed" to a future they can actually build a life on.

  You won't be shipping features into a void. You'll be helping millions of people reach the American dream — a stable, meaningful career that changes the trajectory of their whole family. The impact is direct, it's human, and it's exactly why we do this

• AI Sandbox: We encourage you to experiment with the newest models and tools. If a new agentic tool comes out that saves time, we buy it.

• Remote-First Culture: We don't care where you sit, as long as you are authorized to work in the US and are aligned with our timezone for collaboration.

• We're Well-Funded — and Just Getting Started

  This isn't a "hope it works out" gamble. We closed a $10.7M seed round backed by leading fintech and venture investors who believe in what we're building. And the traction backs it up. Lumion is now the operating system for 400+ career schools, supporting 150,000+ students across 48 states and 29 industries. The results speak for themselves — schools on Lumion see 47% more completed applications, a 73.6% application-to-enrollment rate, 91% on-time tuition collection, and 21% higher student retention. We've got the capital, the momentum, and the market timing — enrollment in the trades is finally outpacing four-year colleges — to build something that lasts. You'd be joining early enough to shape the product and the company, with the runway to actually do it right.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $120,000 - $130,000 USD

• Equity: Meaningful stock options in a venture-backed startup.

• Bonuses: Quarterly performance-based cash bonuses.

• Perks: Unlimited PTO, 401(k), full Health/Dental/Vision reimbursement up to $537.50/mo, $200/mo tech stipend, $100/mo wellness stipend.

Join Lumion. Build the OS for the future of skilled trades. 🚀