\nWe are hiring a PHP Staff Engineer to focus on backend application work and technical leadership while contributing to DevOps, data, and frontend work as necessary. We’re a small team, so the blend will depend on the individual and the project.\n\n\nIdeal candidates will have an incredibly strong Web SaaS background, a decade or two of Web-based professional history, and a deep comfort with PHP. You are consistently assessing whether technical choices are adding or removing system complexity. You enjoy enabling your teammates to do their best work with clear & appropriate feedback, tailored guidance, and thoughtful workload sharing. You are deeply critical of which technical choices and work will have the most meaningful impact on our goals.\n\n\nThis role offers 160K/yr and participation in our ESOP (Employee Stock Option Program) with a 4-year vesting schedule. If you start by 1 April, you’ll be eligible for the company-wide annual 1 July pay raise. If you’re interested in the role but have questions or feedback, please email the hiring manager. No one’s resume will get buried for being critical, it’s kinda the point of the job.\n\n\nWe will accept applications through Friday, 21 February and begin the email screening process as soon as possible. Initial interviews will ideally be scheduled for 24-27 February, and second interviews the week of 10 March. There are two 90-minute interviews (hiring manager + panel) and we request 3 professional references (but let's talk anyway if you have circumstances that make that impossible). We are filling this role ASAP, preferably no later than 1 April. Please note availability concerns in your application! We can be flexible and are happy to accommodate whenever we can. \n\n\nAbout uConnect \n\n\nuConnect is on a mission to help more people realize their potential by improving access to career services for all people - early in their lives and throughout their careers. Focused on the traditional higher education market, uConnect's All-In-One Virtual Career Center is used by a wide range of institutions including UCLA, MIT, and Baton Rouge Community College to radically improve utilization of career services, career readiness and student outcomes.  We're a mission-driven team working in a fun and collaborative culture which puts people first. uConnect is backed by leading technology investors including Growth Street Partners, Strada Education and LearnLaunch.\n\n\n\nCore responsibilities\n* Collaboratively plan, document, and execute complex web application programming tasks. This is foremost an individual contributor role responsible for shipping.\n* Adhere to team coding standards and architectural principles.\n* Demonstrate advanced knowledge of one or more relevant programming languages in day-to-day use.\n* Demonstrate best practices in submitted code.\n* Make informed decisions about what qualifies as in- and out-of-scope for current tasks and communicate those decisions succinctly and thoroughly.\n* Raise concerns, questions, and ambiguities for team discussion; lead consensus-building.\n* Identify risks in current code, environment, and/or process; recommend alternatives.\n* Add automated low-level tests to code as appropriate.\n* Troubleshoot existing code for defects, performance issues, or other unwanted behavior.\n* Take ownership of overall application code base and be accountable for its long-term health, performance, and alignment with team goals.\n* Take on independent investigations or maintenance projects to enable the rest of the team.\n* Take a leadership role in overall technical decisions and direction.\n* Work cross-functionally with Product, Customer Success, and other stakeholders to identify the best outcomes possible given our goals and constraints.\n\n\n\nSecondary responsibilities\n* Assist with support and bug triage.\n* Assist with CI/CD pipeline as necessary.\n* Assist with E2E tests as necessary.\n* Improve application observability with logging and automated alerting.\n* Explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.\n* Guide and mentor other engineers of all levels with their professional growth and learning.\n* Assist with hiring engineers as requested.\n* Investigate new technologies for applicability to current and future engineering challenges.\n* Monitor the broader technology ecosystem for significant changes and brief team.\n* Respond to priority support incidents during off-hours in rare business-critical situations.\n\n\n\nWhat will a typical day look like?\n* Attend daily engineering standup (Mon-Thu). What’s blocking you, and how can you help your teammates? Sometimes we also do work refinement during this time.\n* Meet with stakeholders and peers to understand and prioritize needs.\n* Programming new product features, upgrading existing functionality, and updating dependencies and pipelines.\n* Performing code review async via pull request or synchronously via Zoom.\n* Validating application functionality through the use of both automated and manual testing.\n* Pairing with another engineer to trade experience or collaborate on a particular challenge. (We encourage pairing as needed and it shouldn’t be “never” but there’s no mandate.)\n* Researching tools, patterns and practices relevant to current or future work.\n* Writing internal documentation about technical choices, runbooks, or team practices.\n* Working with your manager to discuss and implement guidance or technical coaching plans for other engineers.\n* On Fridays (or an equivalent amount of time elsewhere in the week at your discretion), you’re encouraged to pursue team-agreed work that isn’t explicitly toward the product roadmap, like tool upgrades or technical research. We are purposefully targeting 20% of capacity toward maintenance work.\n\n\n\nCore skills & experiences (You check most of these boxes)\n* Building and maintaining Web SaaS products for at least 5 years (12+ is ideal).\n* Advanced programming experience in a Web server context, PHP strongly preferred.\n* Programming experience in JavaScript and HTML/CSS.\n* Advanced SQL query authoring and relational database design constraints.\n* Working remotely with a cross-functional team & collaborating with other engineers.\n* Task refinement & scoping, self-organization, and prioritization.\n* Team-based communication (asking for what they need and conveying challenges and timelines proactively), active listening, and consensus building.\n* Giving and receiving constructive and well-communicated code review feedback.\n* Experience with one or more web application frameworks, especially event-based (as in WordPress, not Kafka).\n* Troubleshooting DNS and web request / server response structures.\n* Validating code using test automation (unit or functional/integration).\n* Controlling major sources of application complexity and managing dependencies thoughtfully.\n\n\n\nAccretive skills (We hope you check a few of these boxes)\n* Using, designing, documenting, and building REST APIs.\n* Experience with WordPress (or similar).\n* Experience using caching layers to improve web application performance.\n* Building & improving CI pipelines (we use BitBucket).\n* Evaluating application-level security and remediation of flaws.\n* Evaluating & implementing accessibility requirements.\n* Experience with data pipelines, feed processing, and/or data migrations.\n* Working with Python (used in our data pipeline), data warehouses, and/or data visualization (We use GCP / BigQuery / Looker).\n* Iterative self-directed learning is second nature to you.\n* You’ve read resources or books like Will Larson’s Staff Engineer and are thoughtful about the strategic role of the Staff Engineer in an organization.\n\n\n\nWhy take this role?\n* High impact, high efficiency, sustainable efforts, & minimal politics. Our entire company culture is oriented to winning together, not individual interests.\n* Truly flexible work schedule with consistent effort to minimize meetings and prioritize individual needs. Unlimited PTO, 15 holidays, plus a mostly-shutdown entire final week of the year.\n* Commitment to a healthy engineering culture with a focus on great documentation, team-based work refinement, and clear acceptance criteria. We’re not done improving how we work.\n* We’re not just “committed to diversity”, we have a diverse & inclusive team and continue to iterate on policies that support it.\n* You're aligned with our mission of improving access to career services & employment outcomes for higher education students by supporting their individual needs.\n* Your 5-year plan could involve deepening your technical skills and focusing on impact as a special project “solver”, becoming the technical lead of a second product team as it forms, or transitioning into an engineering management role. (It likely does not involve becoming an overall project “architect” as that is our principal’s primary role.)\n\n\n\nCompensation package\n* $160,000 annual salary (with annual raise 1 July).\n* 4-year vesting stock options\n* Unlimited PTO (you must use at least 3 weeks; 4-6 is normal)\n* Health insurance (Gold PPO) premium 100% covered for employee & 60% for dependents (Dental 75% for employee & 50% for dependents; Vision 75% for employee)\n* 4% 401K contribution (3% full match + 2% half match)\n* $600 annual home office stipend\n* 12 weeks parental leave (after 1 year)\n* Guaranteed remote work policy (there’s no office)\n\n\n\nHiring process\n* Screening over email (call optional)\n* 90-minute alignment interview (Zoom video)\n* 90-minute functional area interview (Zoom video)\n* Pre-offer stage: (1) 60-minute Meet & Greet with CEO (Zoom video), (2) 3 references (preferably all who worked directly with you for 6 months or more; 1 senior to you in your team or reporting chain)\n* Background check (we do not automatically disqualify applicants for non-violent criminal convictions)\n\n\n\nAbout the team\n* We are fully remote, but require employees reside in the continental US or Canada due to time zones & compliance overhead.\n* We employ 7 full-time engineers (Manager, 4 Application, 1 Data, 1 QA Automation) that lean senior (2 staff-level, 3 senior-level, 2 mid-level, 0 entry — yes, that’s the scale). There is 1 product manager (with plans to grow).\n* No engineers have left the company in 3 years. Our principal engineer has been with the company 12 years. \n* We use a Kanban workflow in Jira (“kanban-like” if we’re being pedantic) with clear acceptance criteria and Gherkin for testing criteria.\n* In 2024, half our tickets were in support of our strategic roadmap, 20% were maintenance work, and the rest were requests (support escalations and other non-roadmap work).\n* We primarily build in a WordPress-based monolith with a few ancillary AWS services.\n* We have managed hosting, so there is no on-call rotation, but as a staff engineer you will be on the short-list of emergency technical contacts. (We had zero emergencies in 2024.)\n* Two years ago, we had zero automated tests. Today, we have more than 500 (300 of which are E2E) and will aggressively increase that number this year, focusing on PHP integration tests in a specific section of the product.\n* We’re publishing our interview plan, onboarding impact plan, and performance review criteria for this role. Our small team works best by being engaged, taking ownership, and exercising critical thinking every day. This role is critical to continuing and expanding that strategy, so consider coming to your interviews with good questions.\n* West coasters beware: Standup is 10:30am ET (Mon-Thu; we don’t have standing meetings on Fridays). It is our team’s only standing meeting (besides 1:1s with your manager and monthly All Hands).\n\n\n\nWhat will your 90-day onboard look like?\n* Weeks 1: Meet people, read docs, complete training, set up your localhost, ask questions. We’re not a “commit code on day 1” shop; relax & adapt. Check in with your manager daily.\n* Weeks 2-4: Dig into team’s current problem set and how you can start contributing now, while also learning medium- and long-term goals to start aligning decisions with them. Join the team’s workflow and complete prioritized work. Check in with your manager a few times a week.\n* Months 2-3: Take work that aligns with your learning goals to quickly expand your exposure to various parts of the product and stack. Make strong contributions, but more biased toward learning than highest priority, tapering back toward priority-based work toward the end of 90-days at the pace that makes sense. Choose a longer-term 1:1 pace.\n\n\n\n\n\n$160,000 - $160,000 a year\n \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Design, SaaS, Wordpress, Python, Testing, JavaScript, Education, PHP, Senior, Engineer and Backend jobs that are similar:\n\n $50,000 — $100,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n
\n\n#Location\nCambridge, MA or Remote

\nAbout Betterworks\n\nBetterworks provides enterprise software to easily manage strategic plans, collaborative goals (OKRs), and ongoing performance conversations.  Betterworks software helps high-performing companies get aligned, and execute more effectively. \n\nBetterworks' mission is to build solutions that help companies execute their strategic objectives through people engagement, performance enablement and decision analytics. We are working with some of the world’s leading brands like Walmart and Intuit to disrupt the business and talent management spaces with next-generation Strategic Execution and Performance Management solutions. \n\nWhat You’ll Be Doing\n\nAs a Senior Software Engineer at Betterworks, you will be responsible for developing an enterprise-class continuous performance management system. You will,\n\n\n* Build a complex talent management application that will drive decision-making at scale in large enterprises.\n\n* Implement an architecture that will scale as the product grows.\n\n* Build a complex application that will drive decision making at scale in large enterprises\n\n* Develop clean, efficient, and maintainable code using best practices\n\n* Collaborate with product managers, designers, qa and other stakeholders to translate requirements into technical specifications\n\n* Mentor and provide guidance to junior team members\n\n* Conduct code reviews and ensure adherence to coding standards\n\n* Troubleshoot and debug issues to ensure optimal performance and reliability\n\n* Stay updated on emerging technologies and trends in software development\n\n\n\n\nWhat’ll Help You Be Successful\n\n\n\n* Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.\n\n* 5+ years of experience in Software Development.\n\n* A strong full stack developer experience with Django , nodejs\n\n* Good understanding of Web Application and Backend development technologies\n\n* Strong understanding and working experience in REST APIs\n\n* Working experience with Postgres or similar relational database\n\n* Strong engineering practices - pair programming, test-driven development, jest, git-flow\n\n* Working experience of AWS lambdas is a plus\n\n* Integration experience is a plus\n\n* Solid understanding of software engineering principles, design patterns, and best practices\n\n* Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills\n\n* Ability to work independently and as part of a team in a fast-paced environment\n\n* Strong communication and collaboration skills\n\n* Experience with Scrum methodologies and remote teams is a plus\n\n\n\n\nWhat We All Do\n\n\n* All employees share the responsibility of being aware of information security risks and adhering to information security policies and procedures. \n\n* All employees are required to participate in information security awareness and training programs. \n\n* All employees have a responsibility to handle data in accordance with data classification and handling guidelines. Employees should be aware of the sensitivity of the data they interact with and follow appropriate security measures. \n\n* All employees have a responsibility of reporting information security incidents in accordance with information security policies and procedures. \n\n\n\n\nLife at Betterworks\n\nAt Betterworks, we prioritize our people. In that spirit, we’ve put together a great benefits program to support our employees’ health and wellness that includes the following:\n\n\n* Work closely with a cross functional team of highly motivated and intelligent folks with a unique range of startup and enterprise experience.\n\n* Balanced Work / Life with unlimited vacation.\n\n* Vibrant company culture with frequent team building events.\n\n* Competitive salary with stock options.\n\n* Company sponsored health and personal accident insurance benefits.\n\n* Remote first work culture that allows you to work from anywhere in India and travel to meet as a team when possible.\n\n* A one-time reimbursement for work from home office set up.\n\n* A monthly stipend for internet.\n\n\n\n\nAbout Betterworks\n\nBetterworks® aligns, develops and activates your workforce for business growth. Through our easy-to-use, integrated software solutions and expertise, we help organizations replace outdated annual review processes with powerful Continuous Performance Management® programs that help managers be better at the conversations, coaching and development necessary to inspire and motivate the entire workforce to meet today's goals and be ready for tomorrow's challenges. Our solution supports truly global workforces, and is used daily by workers from more than 100 countries with localization support in more than 20 languages.\n\nFollow Betterworks on Twitter or connect with us on LinkedIn\n\nWe are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We are committed to inclusive and diverse betterworks. We believe that different perspectives lead to better ideas, and better ideas allow us to better understand the needs and interests of our diverse, global betterworks Community. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives and are an equal opportunity employer. \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Design, Django, Senior, Engineer and Backend jobs that are similar:\n\n $50,000 — $100,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n

\n\n\ntakealot.com, a leading South African online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Test Automation (Web/Apps) Engineer to join our team in either Cape Town, Stellenbosch or Johannesburg.\n\nWe are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us.  We offer a market related, Total Remuneration Package which allows full flexibility according to your needs, a great work environment and a promise that you won’t be bored as long as you are prepared for a challenge and want to build something great.\n\n \n\nReporting Relationships\n\nWork closely with the QA Manager to ensure quality is implemented as part of the processes and that quality standards are adhered to.\n\nYour mission should you choose to accept it:  \n\n\n* Raise development quality by developing processes and best practices for testing in Dev\n\n* teams\n\n* Improve and automate test strategies.\n\n* Develop and execute automated test cases to diagnose issues and bugs, creating test\n\n* data when required.\n\n* Identify, design, develop, execute and maintain automation scripts/code.\n\n* Implement automation framework with continuous integration/deployment covering UI,\n\n* API, unit, DB and integration tests.\n\n* Identify testing deficiencies and subsequently implement automated tests based on their\n\n* requirements\n\n* Identify, record, document thoroughly and track bugs\n\n* Perform regression testing when bugs are resolved\n\n* Increase code coverage across the team’s technology stack\n\n* Develop status reports based on test completion/findings and communicate these to\n\n* team leaders including any impact on the overall project plan.\n\n* Mentoring and guiding the test team on test approaches and automation suite.\n\n* Production on-call availability on a rotational roster\n\n\n\n\n \n\nSkills needed:\n\n\n* Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to understand and\n\n* critique requirements.\n\n* Strong interpersonal skills including the ability to promote cooperation between a\n\n* developer, Technical project managers, and QA team.\n\n* Flexibility to learn new technologies and explore new tools with ease\n\n* Flexible and adaptable to changing priorities or circumstances.\n\n\n\n\n \n\nQualifications and experience:\n\n\n* Bachelors Degree or Advanced Diploma in Computer Science, Information Systems or Information Technology or related field and a minimum of 3 years Test Automation experience. \n\n* In the event that a candidate does not have a Bachelors Degree or Advanced Diploma (in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering or a related field), an equivalent experience requirement must be met, which equates to a minimum of 6 years of Test Automation experience. \n\n* Experience with Jenkins, GitLab, Travis CI or another Continuous Integration\n\n* application will be advantageous.\n\n* Experience testing and administering in Linux and/or other Unix environments will be an\n\n* advantage.\n\n* Experience installing, upgrading, configuring and verifying (smoke tests) virtualised\n\n* testing environments (VMs) Docker, Kubernetes, Vagrant, etc…\n\n* Basic understanding of backend logistics systems is highly advantageou\n\n* Experience managing testing throughout the SDLC (development testing, unit/integration\n\n* testing, API testing, performance testing, system testing, regression testing, etc..)\n\n* Experience in testing multiple platforms, including desktop, web and mobile-based\n\n* systems\n\n* Strong knowledge of software QA methodologies and processes.\n\n* Strong experience with Python,\n\n* Experience with automation of event-driven systems e.g. Kafka\n\n* Understands web services (REST) and underlying protocols (HTTP/S, TCP/IP).\n\n* Hands-on experience with automated testing tools and frameworks Pytest, Robot\n\n* Framework, Postman, SOAPUI, Selenium (python), Appium, etc\n\n* Experience with unit test frameworks PyTest, JUnit, NUnit, etc…\n\n* Strong knowledge of databases and scripting using MySQL and/or SQL.\n\n* Experience in writing test documentation such as test plans and test cases depending upon the project\n\n* Experience using configuration management and version control using GIT or SVN.\n\n* Experience in using test management tools such as Xray, Tesflo\n\n* Experience in using bug-tracking tools such as Jira\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\nThink you’ve been challenged before? Think again!\n\n\n* Scale: Over 2.5 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.\n\n* Learn: We work with the best of the best, and then some. Code alongside industry leaders and upskill in record time.\n\n* Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com, Superbalist.com and Mr D Food. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.\n\n\n\n\nLet’s talk about life @ Takealot Group\n\n\n* The power is in your hands: We offer a market-related, Total Remuneration Package which allows full flexibility according to your needs. Go on, be the master of your own destiny.\n\n* No doors: We aren’t fans of stuffy offices or siloed work environments. See someone you like? High five, collab and make something great.\n\n* Remote working: Love water cooler chats and working from home? Takealot.com offers a hybrid working model for the best of both worlds.\n\n* Mentorship programme: We aren’t kidding when we say the people with the best people win. Now’s your chance to be one of the best, by learning from the best.\n\n* Naspers Tech Community & Online Learning: Share ideas and grow with global industry leaders who are all just a Slack message away. Love to learn? Up-skill with free access to courses on MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera and more.\n\n* Good times: Get to know the other extraordinary minds at takealot.com during regular social events and out-of-office activities (think hikes, think mini golf, think good times).\n\n* Staff discount. Millions of products across 28 departments. What more could you ask for?\n\n* Birthday leave: Cake Day all the way. Enjoy your day off - you deserve it. \n\n* Right tools, right job: Mac or Windows, two monitors or one. Whatever your preference, you’ll work on the latest tech, off the latest tech.\n\n* Help when you need it most: Confidential counselling, legal support and financial guidance, for free, anytime, anywhere. \n\n* Tech stack (for days): ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes and all things machine learning. If you build it, they will come.\n\n* Free parking: No more 5km fun runs to your desk (unless you want to). \n\n\n\n\nLike what you see? \n\nIf you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind. Apply today!!\n\nTakealot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from the previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference\n\n \n\n  \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Testing, API, Legal, Engineer, Linux and Backend jobs that are similar:\n\n $55,000 — $105,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n
\n\n#Location\nCape Town, Western Cape, South Africa