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Principal / Lead PHP Developer

Skylab is a digital agency specialising in digital strategy and software development. We are based near Media City in Trafford Park Village, Manchester. We are hiring a Principal Developer to lead the technical efforts of a small team delivering work on behalf of a key client over the next few years.

Skylab has a talented team, a great culture, great clients, creates world class work and has digital innovation at its core. We care greatly about both the quality and the craft of our work.

What you’ll be doing:

Providing the technical vision for a small team on a multi year project designing and delivering a roadmap facilitating the digital transformation of a major UK sport organisation. You will have the opportunity to define both the team and the technical implementation being used, choosing the right technology for the right problem.

As a technical architect, you will be accountable for key decisions around system architecture that affect production, operations, scalability, load and maintainability. You will have the opportunity to evolve customer architecture and collaborate with others to help lead a technical roadmap and vision.

As a senior developer, you will work as a role model within our studio environment. You will estimate and break down tasks and be hands on in the process of carrying them out with your team.

As a driver of best practice you will improve and drive our software engineering practices such as refactoring, code reviews and automated testing. You will also work to improve our process to ensure that we work in the best possible way.

You will get from us:

  • A competitive salary.
  • Flexible working hours.
  • 30 days paid holiday (22 + 8 UK national holidays).
  • A great working environment with free tea, coffee and other treats.
  • A top of the range MacBook Pro with a high quality second monitor.
  • Regular socials and bi-annual company away days.
  • Personal development time and training to improve your individual skills in any area you choose.
  • Time dedicated to exploring new technology and ways of working.
  • A strong focus on work life balance.
  • Free parking if you drive or secure bike storage if you don’t.

What we’re looking for:

Not all of these are essential, as long as you have a lust for knowledge. We will happily talk to you about your natural strengths and also the areas that you are keen to improve. Skylab is a wonderful journey and we are here to help you every step of the way.

You definitely:

  • Will act as an architect, a senior developer, and a technical mentor, driving engineering practices towards excellence.
  • Focus on modern engineering principals, code craftsmanship and automation.
  • Are a smart, motivated, focused person who enjoys producing amazing solutions.
  • Have a keen understanding of web technologies with practical experience of building application using both PHP and JavaScript.
  • Are familiar with DevOps and concepts such as immutable infrastructure and Pets vs. Cattle.
  • Have been exposed to Agile / Lean environments.
  • Act as an example to others in the team so that they are confident we can do things right rather than feeling pressured to cut corners.
  • Will mentor, educate and inspire team members and staff throughout Skylab.
  • Have at least seven years commercial experience.

It’d be nice if you:

  • Have worked with Wordpress, developing your own themes and plugins.
  • Have experience of using the Symfony 2 MVC framework.
  • Have built your own software delivery pipeline with Docker, Jenkins or other similar tools.
  • Are experience with Git, Doctrine, SASS, jQuery.
  • Have knowledge of object oriented JavaScript.
  • Have used Amazon Web Services to deploy a high traffic web platform.

Please tell us why you want to work at Skylab and what you can add to our offering of digital strategy and production.

Please send your covering letter and CV to [email protected].

Good luck… and no agencies please.