PHP Developer at Thornhill Associates

Job description

We are looking for a bright, self-motivated developer to join our small, creative and friendly development team. This is an opportunity to express your development talent freely as a central player, while helping make the world a better place, with the convenience of working from home.

Working in a virtual company without physical offices, you can expect to enjoy flexibility in how you choose to work. It would be helpful but not necessary to be near the rest of the team in Johannesburg. We are looking ideally for a full time person, but time commitments and remuneration are negotiable for the right person.

Roles and responsibilities

The role will consist of an even mix of dealing with day-to-day queries from clients and other staff, client-specific development, maintenance of the existing systems, and new application development.

Required skills/experience

• Fluent, confident, friendly and professional communication and presentation skills in English, both written and face-to-face
• PHP (using an object-oriented approach), HTML5, CSS, Javascript (Angular/jQuery)
• Development in a MVC framework (Laravel experience a plus)
• SQL (particularly PostgreSQL) and relational database principles
• Android/iOS application design and development
• Source control (we use Git, hosted on Github)

Experience in any of the following areas would be advantageous:

• Modern PHP testing approaches
• Linux/open source systems administration
• Python
• XML, plus XML Schemata and XSLT transformations
• LaTeX/TeX typesetting

Qualities we are looking for

• Commitment to quality: projects often have a short turn-around time, but have to work first time. This means that we need a commitment to getting things right – and asking other team members rather than making poor assumptions.
• Absolute accuracy and attention to detail: we deal with sensitive information so error-free results and reports are our first concern. This is critical to the success of Thornhill and we take this very seriously.
• Good communication by email and/or Skype to keep in touch with clients and the team.
• Ability to prioritise: there are many things that could be done; we need someone who can effectively determine which projects will deliver the most benefit for the time required to complete.
• Ability to dive into an existing code base: Thornhill has an extensive existing code base, and not all parts have good documentation; we need someone who can dive into the code to understand what it does, and be able to work within it, only replacing code where this would be clearly necessary or beneficial.
• Ability to work independently and in a team: self-direction, motivation and initiative is important as there will be times when you will need to work alone without being told exactly what every line of code should do.

Thornhill is committed to positively impacting those who use our systems and contributing to society, and would want someone who shares our values. We would love someone who gets excited about new ideas and better ways of doing things.