Leaving Laravel
I have decided to leave Laravel at the end of this month. It has been a dream job. I worked on the queue manager, custom eBPF projects, and other systems that push the boundaries of what we can do at scale.
I've decided to leave Laravel at the end of this month.
I worked with sharp people on problems that most PHP developers never get near. The queue manager, custom eBPF projects for process-level observability, container orchestration systems, scaling infrastructure at scale. The kinds of problems I came to Laravel to work on, and I got to work on all of them.
What I built
My role was Senior Infrastructure Engineer, focused on the systems underneath Laravel Cloud. I worked on technically challenging parts of the infrastructure: the queue management layer, custom eBPF-based tooling for deep process visibility, and the scaling systems that decide when and how to allocate resources. Low-level work by Laravel standards. Exactly what I wanted to be doing.
Building eBPF tooling at a PHP company? That doesn't happen often.
Highlights
Deploying three regions for the Laracon EU keynote a month into the job. Speaking at LaraFest, Laravel Hungary, and meetups across Denmark. Laracon US was another highlight. Meeting the full team in person after months of remote collaboration changed how I understood the company and the people behind it.
The team put together a kudoboard titled "Infra, but make it legendary!" I'm not going to pretend that didn't hit me. Joe Dixon wrote about the Laracon EU backstage moment where the k9s dashboard turned into a sea of red and the colour drained from his face. Taylor thanked me for playing a foundational role in shipping Laravel Cloud. That hit harder than I expected.
Why leave
The year at Laravel gave me experience and perspective I couldn't have gotten anywhere else. But my vision for the cloud platform diverged from where the product ended up going. What I wanted to build and what the product became were different things. That gap grew over time, and alongside it I needed a better work-life balance than what I had.
I reached out to Geocodio about their Principal Software Engineer, Infrastructure role. Geocoding infrastructure at scale, the kind of systems engineering I love, and a team that cares about doing it right.
What is next
I'm joining Geocodio in October as Principal Software Engineer, Infrastructure. Different domain, same kind of work.
I'm not leaving the Laravel ecosystem. Far from it. I will continue to be active in the community, contribute to open source, and show up at future Laracons and Laravel Lives.
The Cbox open source packages never stopped during my time at Laravel. Init, FPM Exporter, System Metrics, Queue Autoscale all continued to get updates. A year of new ideas and experience to pour into them.