Senior Wordpress/PHP Developer

Job title: Senior Wordpress / PHP Developer

Location: London

Salary: £60,000-75,000 per annum

Duration: Permanent

Posting date: 2 April 2019

Closing date for applications: 30 April 2019

An excellent opportunity has arisen to join the Development team at Kaplan International (KI) as a hands-on Wordpress Development Lead.

The postholder will be based in our attractive, architect-designed offices in Kaplan International's corporate head office in London. As a developer, they will be working closely with colleagues in IT and marketing as well as having regular contact with the offshore development team in Vietnam.

The company you will be joining is a global education business, part of Kaplan Inc, which provides high quality tuition to students from over 100 countries and employs more than 4000 staff across several continents. For more information, please go to http://careers.kaplaninternational.com  

Responsibilities

As an experienced developer, the candidate will be working on number of exciting projects developed using PHP/Yii and Angular as well as working and managing our website built in Wordpress CMS. Candidates will be responsible for both back-end and front-end development, including creating WordPress themes and plugins.

Reporting to the Head of Development Manager, responsibilities will include:

• establishing and guiding the website’s architecture;
• designing and implementing new features and functionality;
• ensuring high-performance and availability, and managing all technical aspects of the CMS;
• helping formulate an effective, responsive design and turning it into a working theme and plugin;
• capable of understanding and contributing to the technical solution from design through to code level;
• working closely with business stakeholders to understand the requirements and help deliver them;
• working closely with Development Managers and Business Analysts to produce accurate delivery estimates and manage the transition from analysis through to design and delivery;
• define delivery phases of the project including activities, sub-activities, and milestones ensuring these are documented and used as the basis for the project event log, issues and risk log and any subsequent reporting;
• participate in reviews and meetings and provide updates on project progress;
• take responsibility for ensuring that risks and issues are identified and managed closely and drive all stakeholders to deliver on time and to the required quality standards.

Person Specification

Essential skills and experience

• excellent Wordpress CMS experience;
• experience creating WordPress plugins and themes in line with best practices;
• a strong understanding of the latest industry trends and content management systems;
• considerable experience building user interfaces for websites and/or web applications;
• knowledge of working with the RESTful APIs;
• understanding fundamental design principles behind a scalable application;
• ability to work using Agile methodologies.

Essential competencies

• excellent communication skills with the ability to clearly explain complex technical requirements to all levels of the business;
• ability to think through problems and devise solutions that benefit the company in the long-term.
• strong analytical and problem-solving skills;
• self-starter and independent worker;
• formal and methodical approach to development and writing code.

Desired

• good knowledge of PHP;
• experience in any related MVC framework like Yii, Laravel etc will be a bonus;
• sound knowledge of front-end technologies – Angular, HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript;
• thorough understanding of the responsibilities of the platform, database, API, caching layer, proxies, and other web services used in the system;
• familiarity with SQL/NoSQL databases and their declarative query languages;
• working on a cloud-based hosting platform like AWS;
• proficient understanding of code versioning tools, such as Git.

To apply: please send your CV and covering letter explaining your interest in and suitability to be considered for the role. Please apply via the link provided.