\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

Rainforest QA is an on-demand QA solution. It’s our mission to enable development teams to deliver bug-free software while moving at the speed of continuous delivery. We are truly a global team, allowing us to bring together the best and most diverse talent. Our commitment to the distributed team model and to our company values has earned us [multiple culture and workplace awards](https://www.rainforestqa.com/about) and helped us build a diverse team of individuals working toward the same goal: change the way QA is done. \n\nLearn more about Rainforest QA by visiting our [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rainforestqa/), [Glassdoor](https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Rainforest-QA-EI_IE825703.11,24.htm), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/rainforestqa/), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/RainforestQA/), and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rainforestqa) pages.\n\n\n**Senior Engineer (Backend)**\n\nAs a Senior Engineer at Rainforest QA you'll be part of an experienced and diverse team with members all over the world.\n\nWe were built as a distributed team from the beginning and we've committed to implementing tools and processes that allow for and support continuous and effective communication across the world.\n\nWhat you'll do\n* Work on our main app, which contains the majority of our business logic and is written in Ruby-on-Rails and backed by PostgreSQL and Redis\n* Work on numerous support services (including our work scheduler and VM management system - both of which manage hundreds of thousands of requests a day) written in a variety of languages (Elixir, Golang, Crystal, Node, Python) chosen because of their suitability to the problem the service is solving\n* Work on internal tooling to improve the development experience of other engineers and ship faster and safer\n* Collaborate with product managers and our customer facing teams to analyze customer problems and design high impact features\n* Lead projects to implement those features\n* Help other team members to achieve their goals\n* Continuously learn about new technologies and ways to solve problems\n* Work with our customer facing teams to triage, troubleshoot, and fix bugs\n* Write unit and integration tests (using our own product!) to ship high quality software\n\nWhat we’re looking for\n* Extensive experience in Ruby (or equivalent dynamic language) and be extremely knowledgeable of the language and associated ecosystem\n* Extensive experience in Ruby on Rails (or equivalent framework) and be extremely knowledgeable of the framework and associated ecosystem\n* Experience in writing and debugging SQL\n* Enthusiasm for building applications using tools like Ruby on Rails, Golang, Elixir, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery, and Kubernetes - amongst others\n* Practical experience of working on a React codebase\n* Even though this position is mainly backend focused, we expect you to have some grasp of the whole stack to be able to effectively communicate with engineers across the team, and can make frontend or infrastructure changes when the situation calls for it\n* Professional experience in engineering SaaS products\n* Experience leading projects with teams\n* An ownership mindset: you should look not only at what you’re asked to do, but ask why you’re doing it and how it impacts on the rest of the product, our customers, and whether it makes sense. We expect you to be responsible for your work and to resolve any bugs you might ship\n* Excitement to learn\n* Excellent communication skills and able to give and receive constructive feedback\n* Happy to review code and have your code reviewed\n* Can work effectively remotely with remote team members (we are a fully distributed company)\n* Comfortable working in a large codebase with many stakeholders\n\nIdentify with our company values\n* No BS, No Ego: We are radically candid with each other in every interaction. This means a lack of politics, a lack of showboating, a lack of BS. This also means brevity, clarity of thought, and clarity of communication. We give and take feedback without ego, with the knowledge that we all are operating with good intent. No ego is the check system to balance no BS and keep it kind. No ad-hominem attacks.\n* 1% better every day: Continuous improvement is what motivates us. We design our product, our organization and our careers to be continually improving. Mistakes are only bad if they are repeated. Experiments are only wasted if they are not learned from.\n* Own the journey: We are all owners. We demand that of each other. The journey we own is threefold: our customers’ journey, our company’s journey and our personal journey. Our reason for existence is to nail our customer journey, so that we can scale our company’s success.\n\nHow we'll reward you\n* Flexible, remote work options \n* Competitive salary with equity.\n* A locally-adjusted weekly allowance for lunches.\n* A locally-adjusted monthly allowance for remote office supplies or personal development.\n* Unlimited paid-time off.\n* 3 offsites per year: every ~4 months we arrange an offsite for the whole company to get together so we can get to know our colleagues better and understand what we need to do. The location is ever changing, so you will get to see some new places!*\n* currently on-hold due to COVID-19 \n\n**United States Residents Only:**\n* 100% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage. 75% for dependents.\n* Voluntary 401k program.\n\nOUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION\n\nAt Rainforest QA we believe that diverse teams improve our business. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. \n\nPlease mention the words **FOSSIL SITUATE BIOLOGY** when applying to show you read the job post completely (#RMjE2LjczLjIxNi4xNDY=). This is a feature to avoid spam applicants. Companies can search these words to find applicants that read this and see they're human.\n\n \n\n#Salary and compensation\n $50,000 — $170,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n
\n\n#Location\nWorldwide

\nCompany Introduction \n\nHello! We are Opinew, a Scottish company with a small team and grand mission. We are helping online stores to become independent of large platforms like Amazon and eBay by providing a powerful review import and management system. Opinew helps shop owners to collect reviews from their customers while also allowing them to import existing reviews accumulated over years on Amazon, eBay or AliExpress. Reviews enable social proof, which increases sales conversation to make Opinew’s clients more successful. We are working with thousands of online stores around the world, including small stores and big brands, some of which you may recognise, including: MusclePharm, Status Anxiety, Vankyo and Betron.\n\nYour Role\n\nAs Lead Full Stack Engineer, you will play a pivotal part in Opinew’s mission to decentralise online shopping by empowering merchants of all sizes. You are excited to work on a SaaS platform with the latest technologies used by millions of shoppers and thousands of ecommerce stores around the world. Our engineers regularly work with all areas within Opinew as we continue to scale up our SaaS web products. We push updates to our websites almost every day so it won't take long to get your work out in front of millions of users.\n\nAt Opinew we are using Flask/Python for the backend and Vue.js with Vuetify and Tailwind CSS on the frontend. Everything is containerised with docker and deployed via an automated CI/CD pipeline to AWS. \n\nThe project \n\nIn line with the tremendous global increase in ecommerce sales, Opinew has rapidly grown its customer base and product team in 2020. As Lead Full Stack Engineer you will be at the heart of our product development and software engineering efforts working on:\n\n\n* Implementing world-class software to improve and scale Opinew’s review management system  \n\n* Experience with designing RESTful API that supports a rapid growing user base\n\n* Ability to own and deliver end to end API functionality from design/architect, to implementation, to testing, to production release and monitoring\n\n* Ability to accomplish complex engineering task independently\n\n* Envision, implement and roll-out best tooling and automation for all our our services\n\n* Ability to evaluate and communicate different engineering solutions and trade-offs\n\n* Work with the Opinew team to constantly improve platform usability, onboarding, and customer retention\n\n\n\n\nThe engineering team consists of two full-time and two part-time engineers. Depending on their area of expertise, some engineers have a strong focus on backend, frontend or testing. However, generally each engineer works across the full stack and contributes to any part of the codebase. Engineers own their code, ensure maintainability and are responsible for writing unit tests and completing new features without breaking backwards compatibility. \n\nWhat we offer \n\n\n* Opportunity to help decentralise online shopping away from the ecommerce giants\n\n* Exciting opportunity to grow the start-up with us into a global software company\n\n* Competitive salary\n\n* Laptop and any other essential technical equipment\n\n* Education and relaxation: language classes / steam store games\n\n* Reading/Courses - books and online courses to help with your professional development are on us to help with your personal development.\n\n* Home cleaning - we will find somebody to take over house chores to help you focus on what matters most to you\n\n\n\n\nWhat you can expect \n\n\n* An agile, diverse and multidisciplinary fully remote team \n\n* A supportive, inclusive and transparent working environment where team mates learn from and help each other all the time. \n\n* A place to look at things differently, challenge and offer solutions. \n\n* You will be working in a (still) small start-up where the whole company consists of ~10 people. You will have a unique opportunity to make a significant impact and actively drive change in the technology, direction and culture of the start up. \n\n\n\n\nWhat we are looking for \n\nWe are looking for an experienced, talented software engineer to join the engineering team and help us scale Opinew to the next level.\n\nThis position is for full time, 100% remote work.\n\nWe would expect you to: \n\n\n* Always put the user first. \n\n* Be an active participant during technical decisions and discussions. \n\n* Be comfortable to work in a rapidly changing environment. \n\n* Be passionate and empathetic - you fall in love with problems, not solutions. You’re a doer, and a helper. \n\n* Take pride in your work. \n\n* Think like an owner. \n\n* Experiment, test, try, fail and learn continuously. \n\n\n\n\nQualifications \n\nFor this role, you must have: \n\n\n* Experience in working as part of a team to ship high-quality software using agile development processes. \n\n* Experience in developing UI with Vue.js /React/Angular\n\n* Experience in python backend frameworks like Flask/Django\n\n* Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and Python.\n\n* Experience in e-commerce and Shopify beneficial.\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 Engineer, Full Stack, Developer, Digital Nomad, Amazon, CSS, Python, API, Sales, SaaS, Backend, Ecommerce and Shopify jobs that are similar:\n\n $70,000 — $120,000/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