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 100,000 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.

What you will be doing

You will join our team as our Senior PHP Developer (Laravel) and your main responsibilities will be to:

• Help develop the interaction-design.org website, which is a mix of a classic multi-page application with a REST API for PWA:
  • Write clean and maintainable back-end code (we always use the latest stable Laravel and PHP versions).
  • Constantly increase test coverage (we use PHPUnit, Laravel Dusk, cypress.io, and love TDD).
  • Participate in refactoring and eradicating technical debt — with the goal of ultimate developer experience.
  • Optimize infrastructure for better scalability (we use AWS, CDNs, Nginx, Redis for caching, Laravel Forge, GitHub actions + Deployer for CI/CD).
  • Improve our components and Design System in collaboration with our front-end team (we use Blade components, Web components and Vue.js for PWA).
  • Review code from your colleagues (we love PR reviews as a great way to share knowledge and find optimal solutions for any challenge).
  • Keep code quality optimal (we use GitHub workflows with PHPCS, Psalm (error level 3), Rector, PHPCPD, Deptrac and other tools to help you).
• Contribute to open-source projects and external packages (our own and the ones we use).
• Help yourself, and the whole team, get better and better. For example, by improving our handbook. Or use our library of evergreen literature on back-end and front-end subjects to broaden your horizon.
• Actively participate in planning and standup 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, no sweaty palms).

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.

About you

• 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.
• 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++, Java, Kotlin, Rust, Scala, Go, etc.
• …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).