Backend Developer

Reporting to: Software Development Director

In under two decades, Mr & Mrs Smith has grown from a cult guidebook to the travel club for hotel lovers with over 1.3 million members and a hand-picked collection of more than 2,400 hotels. The role of the Backend Developer is critical to the next phase of Mr & Mrs Smith’s growth as we continue to curate the world’s most desirable hotel collection.

The Mr & Mrs Smith technology team takes responsibility for creating and updating a large variety of global systems. Comprising complex

We are a growing team, with back-end and front-end developers, QAs, designers/UX, Dev Ops engineers and product owners, organised into cross-functional scrum teams. We continuously evolve our platform and adopt new technologies when they provide clear value to our customers, our developers and our business.

While the company is London based, our teams now operate full remotely, with members across Europe, Asia and Americas.

We hold regular knowledge-sharing sessions, often go to the same industry meet-ups, and maintain a presence on the conference scene, databases, highly functional back-end microservices, customer-facing APIs and websites, we apply many of the same principles across the board – our obsession with detail, our desire to share knowledge, and our belief in building quality in.

You enjoy understanding how things work and aren't afraid to challenge the status quo when you see a better way. You're pragmatic, curious and take ownership of the work you do. Whether you're implementing a new feature, improving existing code or helping investigate a production issue, you focus on delivering solutions that are simple, reliable and maintainable.

You value collaboration, enjoy sharing knowledge with your teammates and appreciate constructive feedback through code reviews and technical discussions. You have experience building backend applications in PHP and are excited by the opportunity to help evolve a platform used by millions of travellers.

You will be working as a member of an amazing team developing our technology. It is important that you support the company's highly agile development environment by applying creative and independent thinking to complete project objectives.

As a member of the development team, you will contribute to the development effort by developing high quality software components using the company's architectural stack.

We share all our ideas about architectural design issues within the development team.

This is a backend developer role focused on building and maintaining our core platform in PHP and Symfony. You'll work across both our established applications and the ongoing evolution of our architecture, contributing to new features, system improvements and technical initiatives.

Our backend platform is primarily built with PHP, Symfony and MySQL, running on AWS and deployed using Docker and Kubernetes. We make extensive use of Amazon SQS, SNS and Event Bridge for asynchronous communication, alongside technologies such as Redis and Elasticsearch. You'll also have the opportunity to contribute to services written in Go as our platform continues to evolve. You'll work closely with Product Managers, QA Engineers, Dev Ops Engineers and fellow developers to deliver reliable, high-quality software.

• Develop and maintain backend applications and services in PHP and Symfony
• Contribute to both our existing platform and the evolution of our architecture, helping modernise the platform over time
• Build reliable, well-tested and maintainable code following engineering best practices
• Work closely with Product Managers, QA Engineers and fellow developers to deliver new features and improvements
• Participate in technical discussions, code reviews and collaborative problem solving
• Investigate and resolve production issues, with a focus on reliability and performance
• Identify opportunities to improve existing systems, reduce technical debt and simplify solutions where possible
• Contribute to our Agile development process through planning, refinement and retrospectives
• Share knowledge with the team and contribute to a culture of continuous learning and improvement

• PHP 8+
• Frameworks e.g. Symfony, Laravel, Zend
• JIRA - Agile, Scrum experience (sprints, retrospectives)
• Excellent development principles such as DRY and SOLID
• TDD/Unit testing (Php Unit/ Php Spec)
• Relational databases ideally MySQL
• Knowledge of design patterns and able to apply them appropriately

• Excellent knowledge of Symfony
• BDD (Behat)
• DDD
• Experience with queuing technology and Event Driven Architecture
• Experience working in the travel industry. Understanding how rates and availability work would be a major plus.
• Experience working with high-traffic websites