Senior PHP Laravel Developer at IxDF - Interaction Design Foundation

Ever wish your CEO encouraged you to write more automated tests? Or even just understood their importance? Want to work where clean code isn't a luxury but a priority?

Our founder and CEO is a developer himself, and our elegant code is the vein that keeps our company healthy and growing. You'll never have to advocate for the importance of investing in code quality. You can save time (and frustrations) and spend it on doing what matters in a healthy, collaborative environment where your ideas, energy and time are valued.

You'll be involved in all cycles of software development, including decision-making, so there are incredible opportunities for you to take initiative, make meaningful contributions, and grow. Forget political struggles or long, pointless debates. You'll be in a team with minimal distance between word and action, where decisions are made ultra-fast.

This is a rare opportunity to work exclusively with senior-level developers in a diverse, highly organized, result-driven environment where you can thrive personally and professionally.

You'll become an essential part of our team, someone who is making a direct impact on not only the core product and reputation of our organization but also the whole world of education and beyond!

The IxDF is the global leader in online UX/UI design education. We hold the trust of industry giants like Adobe and IBM, who rely on our courses to train their teams. Prestigious universities, including MIT and the University of Cambridge, use our material into their curricula. Help us take online education to new heights and make a meaningful impact on humankind. We're entering our third decade with over 170,000 graduates.

We're proud to have assembled a remarkable team of unicorns who uplift, motivate, and push each other to excel daily. There's a seat open for someone who shares our passion for excellence. Could that be you?

Project Overview

Our flagship product is a vast platform with over 30+ sub-domains for online courses, masterclasses, online forums, and community meet-ups in 508 cities in 107 countries. We understand what PHP developers need to thrive, and we've created an environment that delivers.  

• Close to Legacy-Free Codebase. We know how technical debt and legacy code can turn into quicksand, so we continually eradicate it. Some examples include the complete rewrite of our notification and payment system and numerous enhancements made to our course platform.

• Consistent Coding Standards. We are proud of our strict coding standards, which are the cornerstone of our clean and maintainable codebase. You can find numerous examples in the IxDF Handbook, which includes our conventions for PHP, Laravel, SQL, JavaScript, and CSS, along with other useful resources. You can also find other examples in the IxDF UI Kit, which we're currently rebuilding into an industry-leading  Design System and our handy IxDF component library.

• Crystal-Clear Documentation. Clarity is key. Any line of code should be a succinct, well-crafted, and self-explanatory piece of communication to your future self or your colleague. To string things together, we mix in just the right amount of documentation, with best practices such as focusing on the “why?” and keeping it simple.

• Focus on what matters: Our CI/CD pipeline uses quality tools such as Psalm, PHPStan, Rector, PHPCS, PHP CS Fixer, Deptrac, phpcpd, and ESLint to ensure consistency and code quality. This means we're almost bug-free despite having numerous, zero-downtime, fully automated deployments to production every day. We don't like bugs and would rather focus on what matters most.

• Test Coverage: “The only way to go fast, is to go well - Robert C. Martin”. We love automated testing, especially Unit Tests, and use TDD as much as we can. We've been increasing our test coverage over the years, reaching an overall 38% test coverage throughout the system, with critical systems having over 80% test coverage.

The Stack You Will Work On

#UseThePlatform. We focus on enduring technologies over the latest fleeting frameworks so that our developers' knowledge continually grows instead of becoming outdated after each trend has passed. This philosophy allows us to build robust, maintainable and beautiful code that stands the test of time, rather than chasing the latest hype. Some of our key technologies include:

• Always latest PHP and Laravel versions

• Modular monolith comprising 30+ modules with bounded contexts

• Laravel ecosystem: Horizon, Nova, Scout, Pennant, Passport, Inertia, and more

• Web Components, htmx, Tailwind, Vue.js, Inertia.js, Vite

• Server: Docker, Sail, Octane, Forge, nginx

• DBs: MySQL 8, Redis (Pub/Sub, Cache, Queue Driver)

• Testing: PHPUnit, Laravel Dusk, Cypress

• Advanced CI/CD: GitHub actions, Deployer, Bash

• Code Quality: Psalm, PHPStan, Rector, PHPCS, PHP CS Fixer, phpcpd

• Integrations: Stripe, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Twilio, Mailgun, MailerLite, GitHub, Forge, Coconut, ImageKit, and more

• Cloud: AWS, GCP, and Digital Ocean

• APM & Monitoring: NewRelic, CloudWatch, BugSnag, GTMetrix

What You Will Be Doing

We are committed to excellence, and we seek a like-minded enthusiast to join us. This role is not for the average; it's a calling for a true clean code evangelist.

• Ahead of you is a highly rewarding and enriching journey on which you'll make an impact as you: contribute to the development of the back-end modules for interaction-design.org, encompassing new feature development, constant refactoring, and infrequent bug fixing.

• Write maintainable and clean code, covered with clean automated tests, including contributions to our open-source packages.

• Be an integral part of our cross-functional teams to refine specifications for new features and enhancements.

• Maintain our documentation to be up-to-date and ensure it maintains an ideal balance between abstraction and concrete details.

• Implement new features in a test-first manner and expand test coverage for existing code.

• Proactively engage in refactoring of both architecture and code to reduce technical debt, aiming for an optimal developer experience.

• Use Code Review as a knowledge-sharing and problem-solving tool, as well as ensuring code quality.

• Develop new requirements incrementally, using feature branches or flags, to ship changes to production as quickly as possible.

If you want even more opportunities to show the world what you can do, you're in luck! When you're willing to do the hard work of learning and growing, then you'll find virtually limitless opportunities with us.

You Can Apply For, or Grow Into, Multiple Roles

We're searching for multiple senior PHP/Laravel developers, some of them with a speciality: 

• Senior PHP/Laravel Developer

• Senior PHP/Laravel Developer - Security Specialist

• Senior PHP/Laravel Developer - DevOps and Cloud Specialist

• Senior PHP/Laravel Developer - Full-Stack

Each of these positions shares the same core responsibilities of a Senior PHP/Laravel developer but with a unique focus on a different area of expertise.

DevOps and Cloud:

• Improve and maintain our infrastructure, enhancing scalability, resiliency, and fault tolerance.

• Enhance server provisioning using Terraform, Ansible, Bash scripts, and deployer tasks.

• Utilize cloud infrastructure and services to reduce cost and maintenance overhead, moving as much possible to PaaS.

• Analyze business requirements and design appropriate cloud-based systems and architectures.

Full-Stack:

• Perform and automated security vulnerability assessments, including penetration testing and database scans and integrate them in our CI/CD pipeline (enlightn, Zap, etc.).

• Inspect and implement missing security features, in all layers of our stack, from code to tooling and infrastructure to ensure security in depth.

• Documenting security considerations and holding training sessions, both for the technical and non-technical staff.

Security:

• Implement re-usable, fully tested UI Components using Web Components and the Blade template engine.

• Utilize the IxDF Component Library to implement UIs with the best look & feel.

• Boost performance and responsiveness of existing and new pages, including enhancing Web Vitals.

• Increase the test coverage and improve code quality of the IxDF UI-Kit.

About you

• You possess expert knowledge in PHP and its frameworks, preferably Laravel. You're an expert in software design best practices and principles, OOP, Design Patterns, and SOLID principles.

• You have a great understanding of software engineering fundamentals, performance, data structure, and algorithms.

• You're an engineer, not a coder or a frameworker. You embody an engineer's mindset and are always curious about the mechanics behind the scenes.

• You have mastered the art of automated testing, especially unit tests.

• You're enthusiastic about learning by doing and are committed to putting in the effort to continuously improve your skills.

• You speak and write acceptable English – not perfect English, just acceptable – since you will be working with people from all around the world.

• You value teamwork and prioritize collaboration, focusing on collective goals and harmony in the workplace.

• You're 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 value teamwork and prioritize collaboration, focusing on collective goals and harmony in the workplace.

• You're driven by the desire to make a positive impact in the world and to improve the lives of others.

• You're located within a time zone all the way from Europe (UTC+0) to East Asia (UTC+8).

Bonus Points

You get bonus points if you…

• have expertise in TDD, DDD, Event Sourcing, and CQRS.

• hold a Master's Degree in Computer Science.

• possess strong skills in database management, including scaling and optimization.

• have experience with technologies such as Stripe, Swoole, Customer Data Platforms, or Analytics tools.

• have contributed to open-source projects (you'll join a team of Laravel/framework contributors).

• have an AWS certificate.

• have experience with Docker, Linux Servers, and DevOps.

• consider yourself a security expert/enthusiast.

What we can offer

• A founder and CEO who is also a developer, understanding your challenges and triumphs.

• A zero-effort development environment based on Docker, streamlining your workflow.

• The opportunity to refine and develop battle-tested guidelines for PHP and Laravel.

• A team of Senior Developers, with a commitment to writing testable clean code.

• Bi-weekly knowledge-sharing sessions and 3 meeting-free days weekly for focused work.

• Access to a comprehensive library of books and courses, ensuring your skills and knowledge remain at the forefront.

• A full-time position, within a fully remote organization. Daily video-based collaboration with your colleagues from elsewhere on the planet, and you'll get to meet up on team trips every year.

• A work culture with no fluffy titles, political agendas and corporate drama. Your colleagues value your warm character, your strong work ethic, and the results you deliver. Junior or senior, if you embody old-school virtues of always striving to deliver results, learn and become better every day, you'll thrive at the IxDF.

• A daily mission to help impact, empower, and enrich the lives of millions of people by creating affordable high-end design education to everyone across the planet. It'll be yours too.

• A company where the distance between idea and execution is minimal. We're a highly agile organization with zero bureaucracy or corporate politics – and with exceptional order and efficiency.

• A company culture where passion meets high performance and excellence. To help us improve the world (and yourself in the process), you'll need grit, strong work ethic, long-term thinking, and self-discipline.

• We thrive because we have a hands-on attitude and a bias towards action as opposed to fluff-filled, unrealistic strategies. You'll need crisp execution skills yourself and the ability to impress your colleagues with concrete results, just like they'll impress you.