BACKEND DEVELOPER (PHP) Intro to Gophr On demand delivery has never been so in demand. E-commerce has seen 5 years worth of growth in the past 12 months, and online grocery has gone nuts, bananas and crackers. Then add into the mix ever tighter margins, and all-time-high customer expectations (thanks Prime) and you see why better, and faster and more efficient delivery is so in demand. Which is where we come in. Gophr is a delivery tech company that is reimagining same day delivery to make it work better for everyone involved; the businesses who need things delivered, their customers, and the couriers delivering to those customers. This is what we mean by great delivery, and this is what drives our vision. To give all businesses access to great delivery and all couriers access to great business. The role As the Back-end Developer your role will be to drive forward the next evolution of our new courier and customer product suite. Work with our Product Owners, UI/UX team and technical team to deliver a product development roadmap that’s been created from years of hard-won operational experience, coupled with a lot of serious thinking about how to deliver automated solutions that cover every single aspect of last-mile delivery. Every service, vehicle, consignment size, customer and courier preference variable imaginable. This is a highly complex undertaking, and a role for someone who is interested in taking on big challenges. We’re recruiting a number of backend PHP developers so your role and responsibilities will depend on your seniority, experience and ability to learn and improve. We’re recruiting for 2 backend development teams: Backend Team focused on our back office app, automation and endpoints where you can prove your algorithmic skills or contribute to our 200 internal APIs developed for our frontend apps and API integrations and: API Integrations Team specialised in customer-side API integrations working hand in hand with many developers from multiple well known brands. This team is more customer facing in that you’ll be a point of contact for all Gophr customer integrations, implementing and maintaining solutions across accounts. It will also allow you to become an expert in multiple e-commerce platforms and parcel management systems, and in developing plugins to run with them. The following job description is for the Backend Team. If you’re more interested in the API Integrations Team role - please find it under: “API Integrations Developer (PHP)”. Backend Team is focused on 3 different areas: Endpoints: 200 endpoints and growing used by our frontend and mobile development teams. Those teams are also expanding and with that we’ll be shipping many new and exciting features leading to more endpoints and so on Automation: The whole system of tree-like tasks and events that automate data processing and messaging. These need to be highly scalable so will require you to use your algorithmic skills to deliver best-in-class performance. Backoffice: Internal app used by Gophr Operations Team when providing support to customers and couriers. This is the engine room that operational automation depends on. It monitors, oversees and manages all aspects of courier-customer solutions. We have masses of new features queued for development with many more to come.We’re recruiting a number of backend PHP developers to ship these at speed so your role and responsibilities will depend on your seniority, experience and ability to learn and improve. As Backend Developer your role will be to: be part of an Agile team responsible for Gophr's Backoffice, APIs and automation, develop high-performance, complex applications running on a scalable cloud platform drive product ideas forward, from providing creative solutions to execution use third party APIs to deliver unique features write testable, modular, reusable code unit test your own code and participate in peer reviews focus on processing performance in order to ensure superior user experience on a heavy interaction platforms continuously work collaboratively to bolster backend architecture design and implementation processes in order to improve quality and efficiency Ideally you should be: an experienced PHP developer, medium to advanced using any PHP-based MVC framework (Zend, Code Igniter, Laravel, etc.) good in code performance and optimisation You will be joining the team that is working on the new booking engine that has the level of complexity similar or even higher than your favourite airline’s booking engine - the solution that we want you to be proud of. You will add new features and products to the existing list and will take ownership of it along with the other members of the Backend Team. What we want from you Someone who’s worked with large databases, and understands how to manage them in a way that enables them to perform at speed. Someone who’s enjoyed being part of a collaborative team that takes ideas from anywhere in order to find the best solution. You like dealing with complex problems, working with others to interrogate them to a level where you all feel confident that you’re creating elegant, holistics solutions for the users in question. You should be someone who understands that getting to the best solution doesn’t always mean throwing more resources at a problem, but may require thinking about it more deeply in order to solve for the widest number of issues contained within a certain set of constraints. You should feel comfortable questioning others on whether the solutions being presented may create more problems down the line, and understand that being questioned in return is part of getting to the best result. To be successful as the Backend Developer you will need: Experience working with PHP and any PHP-based MVC frameworks (Zend, Laminas, Ubiquity, Symfony, Laravel, Code Igniter) Great algorithmic skills Attention to details in order to be able to build complex and scalable platforms Experience working in an Agile environment Knowledge and understanding of testing modern PHP code What you’ll get from us Our commitment to you to make this role one of the most positive and definitive career experiences you’ve ever had. We’re currently experiencing very high growth with a sustainable business model and a very exciting product roadmap that we believe will have significant ramifications for the industry in the UK, and beyond. We are a small team, growing fast and that will give you plenty of opportunity to shape your role. Our tech is constantly evolving, we’re capturing tons of data and we have some pretty radical plans for all of it moving forward. Other stuff: Competitive salary package An allowance to spend on the home office set up. Monthly benefits through Ben Personal development budget (TBA - we’re still working on it sorry) Highly flexible working hours Work from wherever you like Quarterly company retreats and parties - weeks and long weekends away Career development - product team is growing by 5x in next 12 months Highly focused on employee wellbeing (73/100 eNPS in 2020, taken a recent hit due to revenue growth - hence why we’re growing the team) Mental health days separate to holiday Ideas and feedback driven working environment: ideas come from both internal and external sources, including bonus rewards for successful outcomes Committed to sustainability: all deliveries were carbon negative in 2020 What we’re about Our mission is to build the largest, smartest same-day delivery network in the UK and beyond through technology that empowers professional couriers of all shapes and sizes to build companies that serve their local communities. A delivery network that creates better outcomes for everyone involved, and feels like magic for those using it. There are over 23,000 courier companies in the UK. 20,000 turnover less than £500k a year, 10,000 of which make less than £50k a year. And they all need help in driving up vehicle efficiency, reducing operational costs, winning new business and access to regular cashflow that runs like clockwork so they can grow as much as possible, and not have to stress about getting paid or figuring out how to stay competitive against larger players. We’ve spent the last 6 years understanding the needs of these operators providing multiple last-mile services, across vehicle types, to customers from every industry sector. The level of knowledge we’ve gleaned in that time has given us a clear understanding of where we have to take Gophr next, and what elements need to be in place for us to get there fast. We’re already well on the way: Series A closed end of 2020, 300% YOY growth and on track to 8 figure revenue this year 3 million parcels delivered, in a market that’s set to 3X in size in the next 3 years. 10,000 clients ranging from household name retailers (Co-op and Hellofresh) to independent local restaurants like Smokestak (great brisket) who were winning from established incumbents, and well-funded competitors 4.5 Trustpilot (best rated same-day courier) Net Promoter Score tracking at 75 over the last 12 months (rare in most industries, unheard of in ours) Deloitte Fast 50 winner; Placed at 15, the highest rank with the lowest total amount of institutional investor money raised Net profitable in 2020: this feels rather quaint, but we wanted to prove that a tech startup in the delivery space is capable of building a sustainable business model. This is just the start… :D We’ve gotten where we are to date due to a highly knowledgeable, experienced and solid team of good people who are heads down working to solve big problems. Ideas come from everywhere across the business; we’re run on feedback - from the internal team, to couriers, customers and partners. We expect that if you’re successful from your 1st interview to an offer shouldn’t take more than 7 working days.