Senior PHP Developer (Laravel) - Remote

Do you want to use your coding skills to improve the lives of millions of people? Are you brave enough to let millions of UX designers use your code? Are you obsessive about your own professional development and continuous learning-through-doing? Then read on!

The Interaction Design Foundation is the biggest online design school globally. Founded in 2002, we have over 120,000 graduates and counting. We’re market leaders in online design education because the world’s leading experts create our content and because we’re specialized in design. What’s more, with over 1.5 million monthly visitors, we’re at the forefront of providing premier design education to such organizations as IBM and SAP, as well as thousands of other companies. Our ever-growing community now needs a first-class back-end developer to help craft the ultimate codebase.

This is where your longing for meaningfulness in your work and your hard-science coding skills merge: Every time your code is executed, you help improve the life of a human being. And not only that, those members will likely go on to design better products and services to the benefit of all humankind.

Our codebase is our baby and it can never become too perfect. It is a vital part of our winning formula. You will, therefore, become an essential part of our long-term success, someone who is making a direct impact on not only the growth and reputation of our foundation but also the whole world of design education and beyond!

This is a paid full-time position and is fully remote so you can work from anywhere! You will have regular video-based contact with your colleagues and get to meet them physically on team trips a few times per year.

About our Platform

You will join our back-end team, which is constantly improving our main product — a web application with online courses, bootcamps and community tools. The architecture is a multi-page application — an MVC-based, modular monolith using Laravel as a back-end framework. It was started back in 2013, and since then we’ve relentlessly increased code quality, features and test coverage, and are proud to say that we have almost zero legacy code or technical debt. We believe a modular monolithic architecture can reach a level of perfection where it’s superior to a micro-service architecture — despite an ever-increasing number of features.

How we haven’t achieved that

- Robust conventions for PHP, Laravel, JavaScript, naming, etc.
- Well-automated CI with code quality tools: Psalm (errorLevel="3"), PHPStan (level: 6), Rector, PHPCS, PHP-CS-Fixer, Deptrac, phpcpd, ESLint, etc.
- Regular pull request review sessions
- All front-end code built using reusable well-documented design system components.

The stack you will be working with

- PHP 8.1 and Laravel 8 (always the latest versions)
- Vanilla JavaScript (incl. Web Components) and Vue.js for Laravel Nova
- Server: Docker, nginx
- DBs: MySQL, Redis
- Testing: PHPUnit, Laravel Dusk, cypress.io
- Cloud: Amazon S3, CloudFront
- CI/CD: GitHub actions + Deployer

What you will be doing

You will be working with several teams: Back-end devs, front-end devs, designers, content and product managers, as well as our founders, who are also actively involved in the processes. You will work most closely with our back-end team, which we are extending from 4 to 7 senior engineers.

Your main responsibilities will be to:

- Help develop back-end of the interaction-design.org platform: new features, refactorings and (rarely) bug-fixing.
- Write clean and maintainable back-end code (incl. our open-source projects and external packages we use).
- Communicate with other teams to clarify specifications for new features and improve existing ones.
- Keep documentation up to date for code you create and change.
- Constantly increase test coverage (we use PHPUnit, Laravel Dusk, cypress.io, and we love TDD).
- Participate in refactoring and continually eradicate technical debt whenever it arises. The goal is the ultimate developer experience.
- Optimize infrastructure (DB, nginx, queues) for better scalability.
- Review code from your colleagues (we love PR reviews as a great way to share knowledge and find optimal solutions for any challenge).
- Actively participate in planning, stand-up and workshop video calls (we have 3 meeting-free days per week for ultimate focus time)
- Regularly ship your code (we usually deploy a few releases per day: zero downtime, just a few clicks).

What you will get

- Expert-level colleagues who contribute to the Laravel framework and packages from its ecosystem.
- Zero-effort development environment based on Docker.
- Battle-tested guidelines for PHP, JS, CSS and Laravel code.
- Up-to-date domain, product and project documentation.
- Great library of books and courses to keep your knowledge and skills at peak level.
- Smooth and well-organized workflows for collaboration with other teams.
- The chance to work on a popular and industry-leading product with an enormous, global community — as well as a worthy mission.
- A founder and CEO who is a developer.

Requirements

- You have expert knowledge of PHP.
- You have expert knowledge of Laravel or Symfony.
- You have 6+ years of experience working professionally with OOP.
- Your work is based on a solid foundation in computer science fundamentals from data structures and algorithms to design patterns.
- You are an engineer by mindset and always try to understand how things work under the hood.
- You love to learn through doing. You’re ready to put in some hard work to expand your skills.
- You speak and write acceptable English — not perfect English, just acceptable — since you will be working with people from the US, England, Canada, Denmark, Belarus and Australia among others. Your timezone does not matter!
- You are a team player and you don’t bring your ego to work.
- You are self-motivated and self-disciplined and thus work well in a flat hierarchy with lots of freedom.
- You love to have creative freedom, make independent judgments and live up to the responsibility that comes with that freedom.
- You love to create tangible results — every hour and every day.
- You love to make a positive impact on the world and the lives of others.

Bonus points

You get bonus points…
- …if you have contributed to open-source projects.
- …if you have worked professionally with at least one statically typed programming language like C, C++, C#, Python, Java, Kotlin, Rust, Scala, Go, etc.
- …if you have prior experience with k8s, Stripe, GraphQL, Swoole.
- …if you have prior experience with Customer Data Platforms (like Segment) or Product Analytics & Tracking tools like Amplitude, Heap, or the Google suite (Analytics, Optimize, Tag Manager).
- …if you have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science.
- …if you have experience with test-driven development (TDD).
- …if you have experience with DDD, Event Sourcing, CQRS.
- …if you have strong database management, scaling and optimization skills.

At IxDF, you'll belong to an incredibly diverse and distributed team. Your colleagues come from 20+ different countries across every continent. Your work will reach students from a total of 100 countries. In other words, every part of your work at IxDF has global connections and global impact.

When you work in our team, you'll work 100% remotely. Trade in that dreadful commute and tedious 9-5 for the freedom (and responsibility) of remote work!

‍♀️You'll have limitless opportunities to work in a state of flow—we love deep work and always encourage each other to focus deeply and achieve great results. This means fewer interruptions, no pointless meetings and greater control over your time!

Your colleagues come from all over the world, so you'll learn to see things from many different perspectives, learn about different cultures and expand your horizons!

⚡As a fully-remote organization for 18 years, we've engineered efficiency into every single thing we do. When you're a part of our team, you'll benefit from our super-organized systems, use the best collaboration tools, and carry out your responsibilities seamlessly with your teammates!

IMPORTANT: How to learn more and apply

We are currently accepting applications ONLY directly from our Careers page. To start your application as well as learn more about our Work Culture and Values please visit https://www.interaction-design.org/about/careers

Please apply as soon as you can—we’re firm believers in the adage “the sooner, the better”, and we look forward to working with you!