Senior full stack PHP developer - The Student Room Group

TSR’s sites have high-traffic, with over a million page views a day. They are built on LAMP technologies, other languages, tools and frameworks including Memcached, Redis, JQuery, Laravel, vBulletin, Magento, Resque, New Relic, NginX, OpenStack, React JS and native, Galera, Varnish, GSA, solr and Ansible.

We are currently working on several projects, the main focus areas being:

o Deep engagement - looking at how we can keep people on the site for longer and improve their experience
o Big data – identifiing what data we have, and could be gathering the right information to improve what we can offer to clients and student

We are looking for a full stack PHP developer that can bring something extra to our team. Whether you are a front-end, mid-level or back-end specialist we are looking for the right person with skills that will help us to develop and grow. In return, we offer the opportunity to develop your career and expertise in a fun and supportive environment.

Key role responsibilities:

Working with the rest of our scrum team you will be responsible for:

o Helping to scope, technically design, develop and deliver on new development projects
o Providing the optimisations and fine-tuning required to enable 7 million unique visitors make half a million posts each month
o Maintaining & improving the existing codebase and providing great technical insight and documentation
o Mentoring or sharing your knowledge with members of the development team and you will be a champion for quality assurance. This will be done both one-to-one, on projects or through regular team knowledge share sessions.
o Keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies and suggesting how different technology might be used to improve our offering

We are looking for a developer who has some of the knowledge and skills below:

• Comprehensive commercial programming experience in PHP on a Linux environment
• Knowledge of object-oriented design patterns and methods
• Experience of MySQL and/or Maria DB database design, complex query generation, and optimisation
• Has worked in an Agile development environment
• Experience using GIT version control and Jira for task management
• A Computer Science degree or equivalent qualification
• Multiple years of experience with frontend development, with strong CSS, JavaScript, HTML 5 and responsive implementation
• Experience managing and maintaining a production Linux environment, with knowledge or the technologies such as Varnish, Pound, Memcached, Redis, Solr, Apache
• Knowledge of Docker, Ansible and/or AWS
• Self-motivated to learn and improve
• Good communication skills and is a team player

Working at TSR
We care about employee development, happiness, wellness and work life balance. We offer a welcoming, friendly and supportive working environment, plus we enjoy lots of great benefits including:

• A competitive salary
• 25 days holiday per year, plus bank holidays
• Your birthday day off
• Opportunities for ongoing learning and development
• Flexible working hours and arrangements
• Group Life insurance
• Generous pension scheme
• Private healthcare
• Healthcare Cash Plan
• Childcare vouchers
• Cycle to work Scheme
• Pet friendly workplace
• Fresh fruit
• Friday afternoon drinks
• Regular social, team and charity fundraising events

TSR is dedicated to creating an inclusive working environment that encompasses diversity and equal opportunities. We are committed to supporting a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and skills.