🔎 About

We are seeking an ambitious full-time remote Laravel and PHP software engineer with managerial experience to join our engineering team at Helix and help build our existing set of tools and websites, shape our product, engineering culture, and team. This high-impact role will be working on incredibly exciting technical projects involving our entire suite of products, both external and internal, and will be an integral part of our engineering team. We seek to build a team of people from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

This job is fully remote and highly adaptable to your work schedule, with the team already spread across three continents, although we have a preference for developers that can work during normal EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) hours.

We strongly believe in empowering each individual with the best tools and skills to become autonomous in their work, as well as provide a network of peers to help them continue to grow.

🌟 Role and Responsibilities

This is an exciting time to join the Helix Engineering Team, as we experience rapid growth and expansion. Our engineering team is still quite small and you will play a significant role in shaping our platform.

• Implement solutions with concise, efficient, testable code.
• Explore requirements and recommend solutions to achieve those needs.
• Support teammates and end users with code fixes and day-to-day interactions.
• Provide feedback on code reviews and be willing to receive constructive feedback on your own code
• Communicate clearly and effectively with non-technical stakeholders to help them achieve their goals
• Take ownership of projects/features and fill in gaps in product as needed

🧑‍💻 Background and Experience

• PHP — More than 2 years of experience working with PHP 7.3+.
• Laravel — More than 2 years of experience working with Laravel.
• Git — Basics and workflows.
• Managerial experience — Are currently or have previously managed people.
• JavaScript — Basic understanding of vanilla JavaScript.
• Linux — Know the basics of navigation around via the command line.
• Ability to prioritize coding tasks and ship code quickly and regularly.
• Ability to work collaboratively and iteratively.

Preference will be given to candidates with experience in any of the following:

• Alpine.js  — Experience working with Alpine.js
• Livewire — Experience working with Laravel Livewire
• Shopify — Experience working with Shopify and their APIs.
• Strong communication skills — Are able to communicate what you're working on or blocked by to non-technical team members.
• Have always had a passion to create and innovate — Builders and tinkers who loves to learn, grow, and share the tools they build are highly encourage to apply.

💻 Tech Stack

These are some of the technologies that we primarily work with on a day-to-day basis.

• Laravel (PHP)
• Livewire
• Alpine.js
• MySQL
• Redis
• Digital Ocean
• Laravel Vapor (Serverless)

🧭 Engineering Principles

The following is a subset of some of principles we, as a the software engineering team, have come up with together.

Technical debt is a useful tool

The conscious, careful accumulation of technical debt can be a powerful tool that lets us ship the thing we’re building faster. Don’t be afraid of it, but be deliberate about it. Just like with financial debt, we know that we need to repay it over time to avoid the interest on the debt becoming unbearable.

Do not accept deviant system behaviour

When a system repeatedly exhibits behaviour that we can’t explain, it’s easy to become collectively accustomed to it and treat it as “normal.” This is an incredibly dangerous trap that we need to help each other fight against: in reality, far from being normal, such a system is out of control. Take the time to investigate and understand the problem.

Write code to be read

The best code can distill complex ideas into something concise and easy-to-follow. When you review pull requests from your peers, remember: if code is hard to understand, it’s probably too complex – and complex code is a breeding ground for insidious bugs.

Avoid abbreviations if at all possible. Abbreviations might make sense to you at time you’re writing it, but it might not be clear to the next person who has to either work on it or review it. It will require more guesswork and brainpower to translate the abbreviation instead of just reading it. Even if you believe it’s a very well know company wide abbreviation, consider just writing it out any way.

Write code to be debugged

Software has bugs. This is normal. You can help yourself and your peers by thinking about how you might debug software from the get-go: favor languages and libraries that have good introspection tools, don’t swallow errors silently, and use telemetry and logging liberally. Use comments to explain the why and not the what.

Unblock others whenever you can

If someone is stuck, helping them is an incredibly high-value use of your time: spreading knowledge and skills levels everyone up. If someone is waiting on you for a code review, prioritize it ahead of writing new code yourself.

Collaborate to completion

Always build for the customer, not the engineer. It may make sense to trust your gut on a solution, but making assumptions without confirmation from Design or Product is dangerous. Failing to keep the other parties in the loop of changes or challenges only damages the relationship you maintain with stakeholders and jeopardizes the feature.

Fail with grace

Engineers make mistakes. We are human, and we may end up breaking a feature or accidentally introducing a bug at any point. Whenever possible, take responsibility for the mistake, and move on to a solution if you can. Dwelling on something that has already happened is not productive for you or team members, but offering solutions or asking for support is effective 100% of the time.

Leave the codebase better than you found it

Any engineer can propose a change to any part of our codebase, and you’re never stepping on anyone’s toes by trying to make things better. 💖

🌈 Core Company ValuesBe excellent to each other

• Be respectful to your teammates, customers and partners
• Act with good intentions
• Explain yourself when unclear or misinterpreted
• Demonstrate compassion and care in your words and actions

Positivity is a choice

• Radiate energy and confidence
• Always assume positive intent

Perfectionism doesn't scale

• Work with a bias toward action and outcomes
• Fail fast and keep iterating
• Be fearless — push the envelope
• Take risks

Own it

• Demonstrate a learning mind-set through perpetual development
• Be accountable for your actions

Bring your whole self

• We are committed to inclusion, equitable support, and respect for all team members
• Diversity drives innovation
• Welcome and encourage the individuality of others
• Your individual opinions matter and must be heard
• Be aware of unconscious bias; we pledge to be empathetic and keep open minds to each person's unique experience

☎️ Interview process

As talented people have a choice of where they want to work we believe that everyone who applies should be treated with respect, integrity and intention with every step (our principles of customer-centricity translate to candidate-centricity). Therefore we try to move quickly and be as transparent as possible. The following is a typical process for interviewing for this role.

• Quick 10-15 phone/audio call with our recruiter.
• 20-30 min phone/audio call with a member of our Software Engineering team.
• Technical evaluation. Preferable this would be that you send us some PHP/Laravel code that you've written in the past that you are proud of and that reflects your abilities. If this is not available for various reasons we usually do a take home test that closely reflects the type of work that the role would require. You would be given ample time to complete this task to fit your schedule.
• A 2-hour interview with four different people from Helix, each is a one-on-one 30 minute chat.
• Lastly a follow up video call with our Director of Software Engineering.

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