Software Engineer PHP (Contract)
Zoopla, United Kingdom

At Zoopla we want to help everyone make intelligent home buying decisions. We are building a team that will have the once in a career opportunity to re-imagine an industry.

As an Engineer at Zoopla:

• You will have spent lots of quality time with your IDE of choice, learning the powerful idioms and important idiosyncrasies of at least one programming language. You are highly skilled in PHP, Javascript, MySQL (or MariaDB) and have experience using Laravel in a commercial environment.
  • Bonus superpower; Deep understanding of MariaDB including low level configuration and query optimisers settings.
• You have extensive experience in writing unit tests.
  • Bonus superpower; You have commercial experience with PHPUnit and Cypress.
• You regularly practice honing your engineering craft, expanding your skills in techniques such as test first thinking, refactoring, clean code and pair programming.
• You will be familiar with Linux and, ideally, cloud based hosting services.
  • Bonus superpower; Able to work with Linux down to the kernel level for config and debugging.
• You appreciate the benefits of CI pipelines and automation for both quality and deployment and have experience deploying your applications.
  • Bonus superpower; You have experience building and working with appliance / golden images.
• You understand the importance of delighting users with your product while making sure it remains stable, performant, observable and supportable. You know the product(s) delighted users because you helped to instrument, evaluate and iterate on them to be sure.
• Importantly, if you’re looking for a senior role with us, you will have achieved many of the things above while also teaching others, influencing your team and organisation, and maybe even sharing your journey and knowledge publicly.

A little about us:

• We're serious about tech but we don't take ourselves too seriously.
• We are spiritually agile, not religiously agile.
• We strongly believe in the value of good design. We believe it is a primary differentiator in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
• We want to build small, collaborative, cross-functional teams that push each other to create elegant, simple solutions to difficult customer problems.
• No matter what the role we want everyone to be obsessed with getting inside the minds of our customers.

You’re a fit for our team if

• You strive to set the standard and are always looking to raise the bar and want to be surrounded by others who do so as well.
• You want to build things together, collaboratively with your team.
• You want to own it; to have ownership and accountability for the outcomes of your effort.
• You have strong, well-informed opinions but are open to being convinced otherwise through thoughtful discussion and debates with your teammates.
• You have a bias towards action.

Job Rewards and Benefits