Igor Nikolic

PHP Senior Software Engineer | Solution Architect

- years and months of experience
- Think twice, code once
- Only serious engineering with the latest tech stack is in the game. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, other spaghetti and legacy systems are off the list

Expertise and Advantages

Core/Vanilla PHP + Symfony/Laravel/Custom-built frameworks

Deep expertise in Core/Vanilla PHP with a strong grasp of OOP, SOLID principles, design patterns, REST APIs, and service/microservice architecture, going all the way to the coding container initialization. I strive to write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code aligned with modern standards. Over the years, I’ve complemented these fundamentals with extensive framework experience, working with Laravel, Symfony, and custom-built solutions based on microframeworks like Slim, to deliver scalable, testable, and reliable systems.

Solution architecture & Migrations from old to new systems

Over the past 5 years, I mainly worked on migrations from legacy systems to new, freshly built systems. The goal was to build an extendable and maintainable platform with event‑driven messaging. After defining the base architecture, we closed gaps by replicating features from the old system, so all customers could move without data or feature loss. This also included non‑engineering work such as writing epics, spotting blockers in my team and in other teams that rely on the core system, organizing technical discussions before implementation, and distributing work to support agile delivery instead of urgent, error‑driven reactions.

Large scale application

I have experience with applications handling around 2M unique requests per day. In these cases, I use caching for different data types, optimize and batch external API calls to other services, and improve performance through code optimization and regular refactoring cycles.

3rd party integrations

I have more than 50 different integrations so far in my career with various 3rd party services, from payment gateways, to gaming providers, to SMS services, to exchange rate providers, to email campaign providers, to national corporate registries to automate company verification and onboarding, etc.

FPM & Event loop

I have worked with both PHP execution models, PHP‑FPM and event‑loop runtimes. I understand the pros and cons of each and when to use them. This helps me make clear tech stack decisions for new projects based on the workload and performance needs.

Reviews & High coverage

For years, I have written unit and functional tests for my code. I regularly participate in code reviews to ensure best practices and keep coverage high. Testing code that instantiates the application container requires extra time and effort, but aiming for 100% coverage gives everyone confidence and reduces regressions.

Work Experience

Nov 2022 - Present

PHP Senior Software Engineer

JobCloud@TX Services

May 2021 - Nov 2022

PHP/Symfony Solution Architect

Condor Gaming

Dec 2019 - May 2021

PHP/Symfony Software Engineer

Citrus Systems

Sep 2019 - Dec 2019

PHP Developer

Soprex

Apr 2019 - Sep 2019

PHP Developer

Ocean ThinkIT

Nov 2017 - Apr 2019

PHP/Laravel Developer

Webtory

Portfolio

For more details about my previous jobs you can visit document .

The best repositories are highlighted on the first page of my account .

Professional Skills

Languages

  • PHP
  • SQL
  • DQL

Databases

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • MongoDB

Quality Tools & Deploy

  • Jenkins (deploys only)
  • CircleCi (pipelines & deploys)

Architecture types

  • Event driven
  • Service oriented
  • Microservice

Execution Models

  • Standard PHP-FPM
  • Coroutine-based with Swoole

Log Monitoring & Alerts

  • Grafana
  • Kibana
  • Amazon CloudWatch

Others

  • AWS
  • Apache Kafka
  • Avro Schemas
  • Redis

Others

  • Git
  • Docker
  • PHPStorm + XDebug
  • OS (Ubuntu / Mac)

Issue Trackers

  • Jira
  • GitLab

Contact

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Education

Oct 2018 - Apr 2019

JS Development

Government of Serbia - itobuke.rs

Belgrade, Serbia - in house

Aug 2017 - Present

Self study PHP Development

SymfonyCasts, Laracasts, StackOverflow, PHP - The Right Way, Udemy, Lynda, W3Schools, etc.
A lot of books about PHP, meetups like PHPSerbia and similar workshops, etc.

Online

Nov 2016 - Aug 2017

PHP Development

ITAcademy

Belgrade, Serbia - in house

Oct 2014 - Jul 2016

FON

University of Belgrade

Belgrade, Serbia