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Senior PHP Developer

The Quest for Legacy Transformation

Are you the kind of developer who sees a pre-Composer PHP application and thinks “challenge accepted” instead of running away screaming?

Do you find yourself explaining why some code comments from 2011 say “temporary fix” but are still in production? We might have just the role for you.

And one of the strangest, hardest technical quizzes you’ve ever come across which will either set your brain on fire or send it into meltdown.

About Us

We’re an enterprise SaaS company (no outside investment) helping chief appraisers at banks with appraisal and environmental ordering.

Our small but mighty development team is modernizing our core systems. We’re an eccentric bunch who believe rooftop cocktails make decisions more interesting, and the best code reviews happen after someone brings donuts.

The Team

We’re a small group of developers who’ve seen enough legacy code to know that “quick fixes” are neither quick nor fixing anything. We value:

  • Actual work-life balance – we don’t do startup hustle culture
  • Clear communication, even if it’s just to say “I have no idea what this code does”
  • A healthy appreciation for both modern development practices and historical context
  • The understanding that sometimes the best solution is to delete everything and start over

 

Required Experience

  • 5-8 years of PHP development
  • Strong understanding of modern PHP practices and design patterns
  • Experience modernizing legacy applications
  • Remote work capability with reliable internet connection

 

Technical Environment

CI/CD & Infrastructure

  • Containerized development with Docker and Kubernetes
  • Infrastructure as Code using Helm charts
  • Automated deployment pipelines with Jenkins and GitHub Actions
  • Comprehensive monitoring with Grafana
  • AWS cloud infrastructure:
    • Container orchestration (ECS)
    • Database management (RDS)
    • Message queuing (SQS)
    • Storage solutions (S3, EFS)
    • Email services (SES)

 

Development Stack

  • PHP 8.x ecosystem
  • Symfony framework
  • MS SQL
  • Redis
  • RabbitMQ
  • Frontend tooling with webpack

 

Quality Assurance

  • Automated testing suites: PHPUnit, Pest
  • Static analysis: PHPStan, Psalm
  • Code quality monitoring: SonarQube
  • Automated refactoring tools: Rector
  • End-to-end testing with Selenium
  • Database version control with Liquibase

 

What We’re Looking For

  • A developer who maintains their sense of humor while dealing with legacy code
  • Someone who doesn’t need a degree but has the experience to know why certain decisions were questionable
  • The ability to read code written by developers who are now happily retired
  • A talent for explaining technical debt to non-technical people
  • Prior enterprise system experience is a plus

 

What We Offer

  • Competitive salary ($120-140k)
  • Remote work
  • A team that appreciates both good code and good cocktails
  • Regular rooftop strategy sessions
  • The satisfaction of turning legacy code into something maintainable
  • A debugging rubber duck with a surprisingly good track record

 

The Challenge

To prove you’ve read this far, include in your application what these two lines would output:

echo strpos (“banana”, “na”);

echo strrev (“banana”);

No need to explain why – just include the two outputs in your cover letter.

How to Apply

Send us your resume, GitHub profile, and the answer to the challenge above. Bonus points if you can spot the intentional bug in our job posting (hint: there isn’t one, we just want to see if you’ll spend time looking).

Salary: $120K-140K USD Location: Remote (but our rooftop is in Tampa)

P.S. If you’ve made it this far and haven’t at least smiled once, this might not be the role for you.

We take our work seriously, but not ourselves.

 

Contact

 Jeff Hicks, MAI

Founder

Realwired

813-230-3798

Jeff@realwired.com