Backend Developer

You enjoy understanding how things work and aren't afraid to challenge the status quo when you see a better way. You're pragmatic, curious and take ownership of the work you do. Whether you're implementing a new feature, improving existing code or helping investigate a production issue, you focus on delivering solutions that are simple, reliable and maintainable.

You value collaboration, enjoy sharing knowledge with your teammates and appreciate constructive feedback through code reviews and technical discussions. You have experience building backend applications in PHP and are excited by the opportunity to help evolve a platform used by millions of travellers.

You will be working as a member of an amazing team developing our technology. It is important that you support the company's highly agile development environment by applying creative and independent thinking to complete project objectives.

As a member of the development team, you will contribute to the development effort by developing high quality software components using the company's architectural stack.

We share all our ideas about architectural design issues within the development team.

This is a backend developer role focused on building and maintaining our core platform in PHP and Symfony. You'll work across both our established applications and the ongoing evolution of our architecture, contributing to new features, system improvements and technical initiatives.

Our backend platform is primarily built with PHP, Symfony and MySQL, running on AWS and deployed using Docker and Kubernetes. We make extensive use of Amazon SQS, SNS and EventBridge for asynchronous communication, alongside technologies such as Redis and Elasticsearch. You'll also have the opportunity to contribute to services written in Go as our platform continues to evolve. You'll work closely with Product Managers, QA Engineers, DevOps Engineers and fellow developers to deliver reliable, high-quality software.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain backend applications and services in PHP and Symfony
• Contribute to both our existing platform and the evolution of our architecture, helping modernise the platform over time
• Build reliable, well-tested and maintainable code following engineering best practices
• Work closely with Product Managers, QA Engineers and fellow developers to deliver new features and improvements
• Participate in technical discussions, code reviews and collaborative problem solving
• Investigate and resolve production issues, with a focus on reliability and performance
• Identify opportunities to improve existing systems, reduce technical debt and simplify solutions where possible
• Contribute to our Agile development process through planning, refinement and retrospectives
• Share knowledge with the team and contribute to a culture of continuous learning and improvement

Key technical skills

• PHP 8+
• Frameworks e.g. Symfony, Laravel, Zend
• JIRA - Agile, Scrum experience (sprints, retrospectives)
• Excellent development principles such as DRY and SOLID
• TDD/Unit testing (PhpUnit/ PhpSpec)
• Relational databases ideally MySQL
• Knowledge of design patterns and able to apply them appropriately
• Application design skills

Nice-to-have skills

• Excellent knowledge of Symfony
• BDD (Behat)
• DDD
• Microservice experience
• Experience with queuing technology and Event Driven Architecture
• Experience working in the travel industry. Understanding how rates and availability work would be a major plus.
• Experience working with high-traffic websites
• Experience of ElasticSearch
• Experience with Go
• Experience with NodeJS + GraphQL