PHP or Full-Stack Developer

A flexible, remote senior position is available at InterPals, a popular social networking site that connects people around the world for friendship, language practice, travel, and more. The site has over 3 million active users. Our user base is extremely enthusiastic and dedicated, which makes development exciting: millions of people already enjoy using the service.

Our codebase is PHP on a typical LAMP stack for a high load website: sharded MySQL, Redis and Sphinx on Centos with vSphere on 10+ dedicated servers. We use some AWS services (S3, SES). Frontend is basic CSS/HTML/JS (for now, largely jQuery). We do not use a 3rd party PHP framework at this time (codebase is fully homegrown).

Your role:

• Join our engineering team of 2 devs (and founder)
• Implement and oversee implementation of new features
• Maintain existing code, fix bugs, refactor code
• Coordinate with frontend devs / designers to update site design and implement mobile version

Requirements:

• PHP experience, preferably on high-load websites where scaling is a major concern
• MySQL - tuning applications and optimizing queries
• JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Linux, Git. Experience with other programming languages is a plus.
• Ability to write lean, scalable, but also secure, modern, readable, maintainable, testable, well-documented code
• Familiarity with PHP best practices and design patterns. MVC experience is a must.
• Experience designing service-oriented architectures - big plus.
• Excellent communication skills (and upper-intermediate English and higher); self-starting, takes initiative and result-oriented

You will be focusing on the backend, but we're a small team, so you should be fairly comfortable with frontend code and basic system administration tasks on Linux too. If you have significant frontend development experience (esp. JavaScript frameworks like Angular, Backbone, React, etc.) this is a plus, but not required.

Some upcoming projects include: refactoring the codebase to make it more maintainable, new site design and mobile version, full i18n/l10n of site, improving spam detection with ML and crowdsourcing techniques, introducing virtual currency and payment processing for premium features.

What we offer:

• Flexible hours, remote work environment with Skype/HipChat communication
• Competitive compensation, commensurate with experience.
• Rates are hourly for initial period, transition to salary after that.
• Super-friendly team and occasional team get-togethers
• Founder is a developer as well, will appreciate your great code and effort

Location: We are entirely a remote team at this time, but if you are in Eastern Europe (we are in Moscow, Lviv and sometimes Seattle), this may be a plus due to time zones and opportunities to meet in person.

How to apply:
Interested? We'd love to hear from you! Send your resume, letter and any other info (e.g. GitHub profile, etc.) to [email protected].