Job description

Lean Library is a scale-up that provides online services to academic institutions across the globe. Our clients include Harvard, NTU and Cambridge.

We are a remote-first cross-functional team of 15 based across the globe with a goal to advance student learning and academic research by amplifying the voice of the library – that’s a fancy way of saying we build great tools to help researchers and higher education students access the research they need from the library.

We are looking for a Senior PHP Engineer who can write clean code to help us achieve this.

We need a self-motivated team player who can bring their experience in problem-solving on busy applications while applying best practices by writing clean code. We are interested in someone who can help build a kind and motivated engineering culture at Lean Library.

THE ROLE

The role will involve working within a cross-functional team to deliver the Lean Library platform. Our API platform currently serves approximately 350 million requests/month and we are adding new features to respond to an exciting market.

The role will not only involve writing features but also providing strategy on technology choices and direction. We are in the process of rewriting and migrating some old systems into a more modern and cleaner platform, as well as creating new ones (such as a usage logging system). We use Terraform, AWS and Kubernetes and there will be plenty of opportunities to learn these technologies at scale, as well as explore other cloud opportunities.

Search is a big part of what we do and we want to explore more around how we’d use search tools such as Elasticsearch to push the product into new directions.

The challenges you would expect to face in your first 6 months would be:

how we build for the future in a clean and maintainable way

how do we scale up for growth

what technologies and approaches should we use to solve problems when scaling

advise on what the team should look like over the next 2-5 years

We have plenty of projects that are on the roadmap from Greenfield projects to rebuilds and refactors. We are looking to build an engineering culture that promotes people above technology

SKILLS, QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

Technologies
PHP 7+
Laravel
Git
MySQL/MariaDB
Elasticsearch
Docker
REST APIs
Web stuff (HTTP, CORS etc…)
Comfortable with the Linux CLI
Nginx

Code

Commercial experience writing and delivering software
Object Oriented
API integration

Clean Code principles

Decoupled code (and an understanding of SOLID principles)
Unit testing with high coverage

Worked within an agile development team with code reviews providing honest feedback and best practice
High level of communication and interpersonal skills

Nice to have:

Experience with AWS and Kubernetes – we use this to run our apps
Experience with Redis – we use this for caching
Experience with GitLab CI – we use this to deploy