PHP Engineer

Key skills and technologies

• Strong PHP skills - you should be comfortable with modern, object-oriented PHP and familiar with the features introduced in recent versions (e.g. enums, property hooks)

• Framework proficiency - we use Laravel but experience with Symfony, Yii, Cake, Spiral etc. is welcome, more than surface knowledge and evidence of solving real-world problems is expected

• Database knowledge - being able to use SQL as well as an ORM, we use PostgreSQL, SQLite, and MySQL and occasionally MongoDB

• Version control - we use Git (and GitLab) extensively so your commit history should be clean and readable, if you regularly rebase your branches you’ll fit right in

• CMS experience - we often integrate and extend off-the-shelf CMS systems, we use Craft and Statamic but examples with any PHP-based CMS (e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, October) are welcome

• Automated testing - we use all sorts of automated testing suites from PHPUnit to Behat to Cypress so familiarity with testing your own code is expected

Beneficial skills

• Performance optimisation - efficient code and database queries that don’t use excessive resources are a critical requirement for many of our projects

• Security - writing secure code and staying current with best practices keeps us and our clients prepared and safe

• Docker - all of our development environments, as well as some of our production ones, use Docker so experience with containers and containerised applications would be valuable

• Software architecture - not just design patterns (but we do quite like the command pattern), but caching, asynchronous processing and more are all used to make robust, efficient systems

• CI/CD - we use GitLab’s pipelines to maintain our code quality and for internal testing, if you’ve used GitHub actions, CircleCI, Jenkins or similar systems you’ll already know how transformative they can be

• Infrastructure - cloud-based providers like AWS and GCP are the backbone of our production hosting so any familiarity with those platforms or infrastructure-as-code systems like Pulumi or Ansible would be a boon

• Planning - we understand that being a developer/engineer isn’t just about writing code, so any experience in software planning like wireframes, specification writing, data modelling, database design, API design or similar would be hugely beneficial

• Legacy refactoring - not all of our projects are modern and greenfield, and being able to work on and positively uplift older projects (not rewrite them!) is a skill we hold in very high regard

The projects you’ll work on power everything from schoolwear manufacturers to dog shows to doctors’ surgeries. We tailor the technology we use to the problem at hand so you’ll work on fully bespoke applications, deeply customised CMSs, and off-the-shelf Shopify stores.

Your day-to-day will include:

• Developing, implementing, and bug fixing features on both existing and new projects

• Writing unit, feature, and integration tests to ensure your code works both now and in the future 

• Reviewing the code of your teammates and testing their work against a spec to help maintain our quality and reduce serious bugs

• Planning features and projects with the rest of our digital team

• Deploying projects to live systems and ensuring they’re working and performant

Your day-to-day won’t include:

• Writing code all day: we’re not a factory and while writing code to solve interesting problems is a big part of the job, your knowledge and skills are more valuable so planning, estimating, and both team and project meetings will all be part of your day

• Client communication: we have a stellar project management team who handle client requests and meetings, however if you do want to talk to clients, we can absolutely accommodate that 

This role is ideally suited to someone with a few years professional experience but is open to more senior applicants. We have a broad range of skill levels within the team, strongly believe in career progression, and have options for our engineers to advance on either a technical track or leadership track. We expect applications for a more senior role to cover more of the “Beneficial skills” list above and also to demonstrate project leadership e.g. working within a small, aligned team.

If you're located in the UK, can travel to Sheffield a few times a year, and all this sounds like a role you’d thrive in drop us your CV and covering letter and we’ll be in touch. We understand Vibe-coding is the buzz word of the day, but we build for real people. We therefore expect our team to be comfortable writing and understanding their own code without an over reliance on AI.