Senior PHP developer

Opportunity to work with a socially responsible, ethical, and dynamic business in the adult industry. Seeking a senior PHP developer who enjoys the challenge of doing hard and interesting stuff.

Working location: This is a 100% work-from-home position.

Relevant timezone: Nominally, we work in the Amsterdam UTC+1 timezone, but this role can be performed in any timezone.

Employment basis: Contractor, paid an hourly rate. You invoice us monthly. Nominally 168 hours a month. We always pay within 14 days.

Language: We are an English-speaking company. Fluent spoken and written English is required.

Employer: abbywinters.com BV (warning, nudity) or our sister business gmbill.com.

Recruiting: You'll be dealing directly with the business Owner and other Senior Developers in the recruiting process. No recruiters, agencies, or middle-management.

Us: We make and maintain web applications to support our ethical adult website business www.abbywinters.com (warning, nudity), running on our in-house software. Some web applications are customer-facing, some are for internal use only. We recruit models, make shoots, edit and release them. Customers are charged for access per month or per-scene using our in-house billing software. We’ve been running profitably for the last 21 years and make human-friendly porn.

Your colleagues: We select for passion and devotion to core skills. 29 people, men and women, professionals from all over the world. GLBTQI+ friendly. Dev team of five (six with you).

Our development team’s approach: Agile development methodology with monthly sprints. Strong focus on unit tests and TDD, CI, design patterns and refactoring. It’s a bit dated, but we currently score 10 / 12 on the Joel test (though, being a web dev shop, they don’t all apply).

What it’s like here generally: Experienced, passionate, talented, and from diverse backgrounds. Shared desire to see the company and people in it succeed, while being socially responsible. Collegial environment of teaching, sharing, learning and developing skills. People have a real, direct and daily influence on the direction and success of the company.

The work environment for devs: Casual, relaxed, constructive, engaging. When necessary, you’ll be in contact with the Product Owner, Sys Admin  / DevOps, QA Tester and other developers via Slack or similar collaboration tools. Mostly, you’ll be left alone to implement stories. No repeating scheduled meetings or virtual standups. We prefer asynchronous communication wherever possible.

What it’s like here technically: Detailed specifications written in business language are provided for all web development works covering functionality, error conditions, UI mockups, and context. Developers make estimations on cards in Trello, and move cards as being ready for review and testing when work is complete. Feedback is provided, fixes made, then the feature is released. Support of a always-available Sys Admin expert for infrastructure and consulting. 

How deadlines work here: We don’t do deadlines. We prefer open communication. Developers do research and make estimations in Story Points, and deliver roughly in that timeframe.

What you’d be doing: Maintaining existing codebases. Extend functionality of existing systems. Addressing bugs from the bug repo. 

State of our code bases: Well-maintained, but with some technical debt, moderate level of documentation. Stored in Github.

Your challenges: Modernising a legacy code base. It's not in terrible shape, but it needs work.

Concerned about your rep after working in this industry? Don’t be. Previous dev staff have said this about finding new roles, after working with us: 

• “…everyone considered it as an asset, and I agree with this. abbywinters.com is a challenging, high availability, high traffic environment”

• “abbywinters.com background is received very favourably”

• “It isn't an issue… If anything, people are just surprised to learn that adult [companies] has its own development teams”

• “[prospective employers are] envious, and never negative”.

Your technical competencies: What you’d expect for the LAMP / LEMP stacks; PHP7 (Laravel framework), OOP, JS (jQuery and vue.js), MySQL & Redis, Memcached, MVC approach, Docker, Apache and NGINX, Linux. AWS for all hosting. 

Working hours: Effectively full time. Specific times left to your discretion, with a minimum of 35 hours a week expected.

Handover / Training: We’ll provide company orientation, and a series of small projects to become more familiar with how we work and how our code bases function. The previous developer of the project will be available for key guidance for a limited time. 

Required experience: Working daily with PHP for mission-critical applications in a commercial environment for at least five years. Note that experience only or mainly in frameworks like Symfony, Laravel, Angular, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and similar does not meet our requirements. 

Favourable skills and experience: Experience with financial web applications. Front end development experience. 

Remuneration: €45/hour.

Before applying: Read our application guidelines and requirements at careers.abbywinters.com, and check the free areas of abbywinters.com to make sure you’re comfortable with the material we produce. See how we introduce ourselves to prospective models at femalephotofun.com, and how we work with our existing models at models.abbywinters.com.

Interview and qualification process: Initially selected candidates will attend a 15-minute screening phone call to check technical compatibility. Subsequent interviews will be with the Owner of the company and separately a Senior Developer, by video chat. Promising candidates will be offered a paid ~8 hour (at €45/hour) assignment to demonstrate their skills and approach.

To recruiters: If you’re willing to do a 5% deal with a six month guarantee, we can talk. Otherwise, please do not message us.

To web development / IT companies: We’re seeking relationships with individual developers, not companies. If you’re a one-person company, please apply. Otherwise, please do not message us about this opening.

Please reference this when applying: RMjYwMDoxZjEzOmM5MToxNzAwOmMxNjg6ODQ1YTozZmU1OjRlNTI=