The company
Silverorange is a design and development agency based in Canada. With this and other open roles, our team will grow beyond 27 people. When pursuing work we focus on interesting and meaningful projects. Over our 22 years as a company, we’ve worked with well-known technology organizations like Duolingo and Mozilla, not-for-profit organizations working in areas including arts funding and affordable internet access for low-income families, and with world-renowned doctors training other doctors through online education.
We’re proud of the fantastic products we’ve built in partnership with our clients and we’re actively invested in the processes behind these products. We are committed to fostering a team focused as much on quality of life, openness, empathy, and a supportive work environment as it is on building great user-focused systems.
The position
We’re looking for an intermediate web developer with a focus on PHP to join our team. You’ll start your silverorange career helping to develop and support sites for a series of clients including some in the medical education field.
Applications will be accepted until November 5, 2021, at which point we’ll be in touch with anyone who has applied. This position is available immediately and we will work with you to get you started as soon as possible.
Growth & ownership
Our team is co-operative and will help you learn and expand your skills via mentoring, team-wide support, and learning opportunities. All members of the team are encouraged and given space to grow as individual contributors, and have ongoing opportunities in project and team leadership. We favour applicants with a strong sense of ownership over their own work, who are excited to learn and contribute, over other metrics like years of experience.
We’re excited to hear your fresh ideas and approach. We have decades of collective experience, and we all continue to become better at what we do by both teaching and learning from each other. Add your voice to our mix.
Opportunity for employee ownership is a fundamental part of silverorange (non-founders currently own more than a third of the company) and we’re currently working on new ways to transfer even more ownership to employees.
Inclusion & diversity
People with different backgrounds and experiences make us stronger, and we’re always looking for ways to improve. Our team is getting more diverse across many dimensions of diversity, but we’re still missing perspectives that could make our work better. We highly encourage people from traditionally underrepresented groups in our industry to apply—we’d love to hear from you.
Responsibilities
- Implementing updates and improvements on a series of websites built with PHP, PostgreSQL databases, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript front-ends.
- Working with PHP packages managed with Composer.
- Updating and building out new front-end pages using a combination of PHP, data from a content management system, command-line scripts, and CSS including responsive designs based on provided mockups.
- Reviewing code and content changes from other developers on the project.
- Working from mockups (Sketch, Figma, Photoshop, etc.), wireframes, and design systems.
- Communicating with team members and clients to understand and balance requirements.
- Identifying and helping to address accessibility issues in Web systems.
- Writing tests for your work.
- Planning, estimating, prioritizing, and balancing tasks and client requests.
- Context switching between several client projects on an ongoing basis.
Requirements
- Be a resident of, and available to work from Canada.
- Be able to quickly learn and understand new systems.
- Have a solid understanding of object-orientated programming in PHP and be comfortable navigating a medium-sized code base spread over multiple packages.
- Have experience working with SQL databases (PostgreSQL, in our case), including managing updates and access to the database via PHP, and direct manipulation of data and data structure via command-line.
- Have an understanding of core front-end Web technologies, including HTML, responsive CSS, and JavaScript.
- Have some experience using version control systems like Git to manage changes.
- Be able to communicate clearly with clients and co-workers across multiple time zones. Several of our key clients are in California and we have team members in PEI, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, BC, and Ecuador.
While not required, if you have any of the following skills let us know:
- Writing and maintaining CSS including responsive layout, browser support, and preprocessors like LESS or SASS.
- Mastering assets (SVG and/or PNG) from Photoshop, Illustrator, or Figma for use on the Web.
- Comfort working on remote servers via command-line tools including SSH and psql.
Remote working is just as good as local
Our team has been remote-friendly for 20 years, and remote-first for the last 6. We continue to improve our approach to having a dispersed team. Due to COVID-19 this position will start as full-time remote regardless of location, though you are welcome to work from our lovely offices in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada once they are re-opened.
Half of our team is full-time remote and 95% of our clients are remote. You’ll need to be comfortable working with remote clients and co-workers regardless of your location.
Typically all employees spend at least one week each year working from our Charlottetown office so plan on visiting PEI semi-regularly once travel is considered safer.
Though you may be working remotely, you’ll be an active member of a great small but growing team, both here at silverorange and with our clients. Regular voice or video communication will help keep you in touch with the smart people with whom you’ll be working.
Benefits & compensation
- Flexible work days, approached collaboratively with you to allow for the realities of appointments, family minding, and your everyday life.
- 3 weeks of paid vacation, on top of 10 paid days of civic holidays, and 3 weeks of paid company-wide shut down.
- Generous health and dental coverage, with 100% of premium covered by silverorange.
- New computer hardware every 3 years, and other tools as needed.
- Yearly company-wide bonuses based on overall company success, plus ownership opportunities and dividends for long-term employees.
- Salary starting at CAD $57-61,000 per year depending on experience, with opportunities and expectation of rapid career and compensation growth.
- Additional remote worker stipend of CAD $3,000 per year and a wellness stipend of $500 per year.
How to apply
Email us at slice@silverorange.com with the subject line “PHP Developer”, a brief overview of your qualifications, links to relevant examples of recent work (GitHub or an equivalent profile is a great place to start), and an explanation of why you’d be great for the job. Tell us about an interesting project you’ve worked on or helped ship. We value individuality and variety, so make sure to tell us what you’re all about. If you have an online presence that you’re comfortable sharing—such as a blog, Twitter, etc—send it along.