Senior Software Engineer - `PHP - remote

Talis
Posted 2 years ago

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will work as part of the engineering team reporting to our CTO.
  • You’ll be working in a friendly team that works closely and collaboratively, and supports each other in a fail-fast and fail-safe environment.
  • We have a shared commitment to our mission and goals, we like to deliver visible and measurable impact frequently, and to build and do the right things.
  • We enable each other to continue learning, grow and be always improving.
  • We also like to get to know each other and have fun along the way.
  • You will be looking for a role where you will work in teams that take pride in their code and have a structured approach to product development.
  • Everyone is encouraged to ask a lot of questions here, so you should be ready for people to challenge and feedback on your approach and ideas, and vice versa.
  • Every individual is expected to make a real and tangible difference to our success.
Our products and microservices are built in a variety of technologies and are all cloud-native.  You will be excited by transforming our impact on higher education globally and be looking for a role that both inspires and challenges you.

You should be comfortable being a polyglot programmer with experience on products with scale, performance and durable code and process.


  • Ideally, you will bring years of commercial experience using technologies like PHP, Angular, React or similar Javascript-based libraries. The primary language is PHP, but it is not essential your experience sits with these technologies but a willingness to learn is.
  • You will want to understand the challenges of building for highly distributed services, working with API's and AWS services.
  • Your job is to work with the rest of the development team to ensure new features – and new products – delight customers, ship on time, and are of high quality.
  • We’re looking for a developer, not just a great programmer – so your ability to question a spec and come up with a better outcome for the user is just as important as your ability to implement it.
  • You’ll enjoy scaling and building for hundreds of thousands of users just as much as shipping a shiny new product to hundreds.
  • You’ll be courageous in your approach to technology and not be afraid to undertake major changes if that is what is required to get the job done.
  • You’ll share our appetite for unit testing, automated testing and continuous integration.
  • Your code will be self-documenting, exhibit sensible and recognisable patterns, and your designs will be capable of being easily refactored as we scale, grow and further develop our products.

The emphasis is on the right tool for the job, so being open to learning new technologies is critical.
It is only desirable, not essential, that you have experience in some or all of the technologies we use today. After all, they may not be the exact same set we use in 18 months time.
The important thing is that you can demonstrate you are a quick learner, select and use technologies on their own merit, and can apply sound theory in your decisions and code.




  • Fully distributed (work remotely forever...but we will get together periodically when things are safe)
  • 🙌 Work with a talented and fun team of people on 3 continents
  • 💯 Ownership and impact - Autonomy and visibility of the impact you're having
  • 👍 Flat hierarchies, open and transparent culture, quick and empowered decision-making, a values-based company that uses words like trust, accountability and customer success and actually lives them
  • 🖥️ Choose your own setup (Mac or PC), we'll also help you get a good wfh setup
  • 👴 A generous contributory pension scheme
  • 💌 Private medical insurance &Health Cash Plan (including dental and optical cover)
  • 🗓 In service insurance
  • 🕒 Flexible working hours
  • 🏖 A flexible annual leave policy that ensures you get the rest and time out you need.
  • 🔍 Transparency - every team communicates progress weekly to everybody – and we encourage you to ask questions or make suggestions.     

Talis (a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAGE Publishing) is an edTech company focused on applying technology to make teaching and learning more connected in higher education. We help universities, libraries, faculty and students to connect to the digital resources they teach and learn with, but more importantly to collaborate and engage with these resources.

We have an established and market-leading presence in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. We have well over 1.5 million students and over 100,000 academics using our products every day.

We are a fully distributed team of passionate people with a culture that is informal. We have a fairly flat structure and we value accountability, delivering impact, transparency, collaboration and solving meaningful problems and customers success.