Senior PHP Engineer vacancy – Commerce Team, Passenger

A bit about Passenger

We build technology to power sustainable transport that connects people and their communities.

Our highly-rated mobile app and website platform commands a sizable share of the UK public transport market. Our technology is used by hundreds of thousands of users every day to travel to education, to work, and for independence.

Our mission is to become the first step of every journey and to achieve this goal we are growing our team based on the South Coast.

As a conscientious company, we value and support personal development. We strive to be a place of work where people want to be and plan to stay. We strive to support diversity, accessibility, and equality in every part of what we do.

What we offer you

Money

• Annual pay rise in line with inflation
• A pension scheme that increases with long service
• EMI company share options which increase with long service and enables tax-efficient dividend payments
• 21 days holiday which increases with long service, plus Bank Holidays
• A salary range of £38,000 – £48,000

Culture

• A culture where work/life balance gets more than lip-service
• Colleagues and managers who support you to be the best you can be
• Company-sponsored lunches, away days, and celebrations
• Quarterly reviews and structured CPD
• CPD budget to help you grow as a person and progress within the company

Health

• Option to work remotely up to 3-4 days a week
• Optional private medical health care through Bupa
• Budget to purchase a fitness tracker of your choice
• Cycle to work scheme
• Funds to purchase optical wear and medical vaccinations

A bit about the role

We’re looking for a senior PHP developer to join our expanding commerce team.

Our product is built on the Symfony framework and lives comfortably on AWS. Working with transactional systems like our payment APIs you’ll be maintaining and evolving:

• Mobile ticketing and e-commerce features
• Smartcard integrations
• User management features, such as verifications services

Fear not, this role is supported day-to-day by another senior engineer and will also work closely with our engineering lead. You’ll report to the CTO and they’ll offer training and support in the early stages and be on hand to help deal with the more tricky stuff as and when it comes up.

A bit about you

Crafter

Dealing with data, APIs, and crafting objects to represent them is second nature to you. What sets you apart is how you’re able to understand the business domain and mold the code to solve real-world problems.

Work smart

You’re a user of modern frameworks and tools as you know that it’s better to work smart, not hard. You recognise technical debt early on and know how to refactor before it becomes a problem.

Cloud ace

You know how to talk to a server and you’ve done more than just tinker with modern cloud service providers, some might even say you’re a pretty big deal. You’re able to appraise each project and its business requirements, suggesting an environment that’s the best fit for the purpose. You’re comfortable seeing this through to delivery and beyond, nurturing the product to life.

Big spender

You’ve been through the joys and sorrows of payment systems because you’ve done this more than once. You’re comfortable with integrations to multiple systems that need to be kept secure and over an internet that isn’t always reliable. But before you get carried away, you’re sure to document your approach for others and – more importantly – future you to come back to.

Voracious appetite

You’re a self-starter, doer, and soak up new ideas and techniques like a sponge. You like to be autonomous knowing that you’ll always be given what you need to do your job well. You work closely with your team, both learning from them and sharing what you know.

Experience and skills we’re looking for

We recognise that the right person for this role may not have previous experience in all the areas that they become responsible for, so if you have any combination of these skills we’d be keen to hear from you.

Delivering work

• Help plan what you and your team are working on
• Capture requirements and design solutions to both product and technical problems
• Make significant changes to the product, adding new features
• Build new microservices from scratch, following our standards

Feedback, communication, collaboration

• Review PHP code from other engineers in pull requests
• Take on feedback from others in your own pull requests
• Document system behaviour and implementations

Leadership and influence

• Champion for product value in the long term, rather than quick wins
• Recognise where others need help and step in as a senior and expert in your domain
• Help evolve technical standards and processes
• Tactfully challenge decisions from others
• Admit to not knowing the answer and know where to look or who to ask
• Work with non-engineering teams, providing a technical perspective

Technical skills

• Use modern PHP, including frameworks like Symfony
• Experience integrating with payment gateways e.g. Stripe
• Apply design patterns, security best practice, and unit testing where applicable
• Create semantic APIs that avoid the need for backwards compatibility breaks
• Effectively manage technical debt, quash bugs and refactor code
• Use cloud IaaS, like compute, storage and queues

Diverse teams

We know that innovation thrives in teams where diverse points of view come together to solve hard problems. As such, we seek people that bring diverse life experiences, educational backgrounds, cultures, and work experiences. Please be prepared to share with us how your perspective will bring something unique and valuable to the team.

Remote working

As the world continues to adjust to life with COVID we’re not 100% sure what office-based working looks like for us in 2021 and beyond. Long before the lockdown, we operated a 50/50 remote and office-based week and for most of the team, we found that this provided the opportunity to balance face-to-face contact and the space to focus when needed.

Our plans to return to our office are on hold until later in 2021, when we expect to shift our working pattern to a minimum of 1 to 2 days working onsite in the office with the rest of the time remote. The right candidate understands that they may need to commute to the office in Bournemouth in the future and so living in Dorset/Hampshire is required.

This role is an immediate start. Right now, it is 100% remote as the whole team continues to work from home. Any necessary equipment will be shipped to you before your start date.

Get in touch

If all this sounds like you then get in touch. Tell us why you want to work here and what youʼll bring to the team. Weʼd love to hear from you.

Interview process

As part of the interview process, we ask that you submit code repositories for professional review to make sure you’re operating at the level we’re hiring for. If you’re unable to supply any previous projects, we’d ask you to complete a short code challenge aimed to take no more than 2 hours.

Our expected timeline for this position is detailed below, the dates are for information purposes only and subject to change without publication if it becomes necessary.

• Closed date: 29/03/21
• Successful candidates invited for phone interviews by: 31/03/21
• Phone interviews & code review the week of: 05/04/21
• Face to face interview (video interview or socially distant f2f) the week of: 12/04/21
• Job offered by: 19/04/21