Senior Full Stack PHP Developer
Location: Remote, India
Type of Contract: Permanent, Full time
Start Date: ASAP
Salary: 13 LPA - 18.5 LPA depending on experience
Who we are: Oxford International
Oxford International Education Group is a renowned institution dedicated to providing exceptional educational experiences to international students. With a global presence and a commitment to academic excellence, we strive to empower students to achieve their full potential and thrive in a dynamic, interconnected world. We are proud of our culture and have recently been officially certified as a Great Place to Work ©!
Background
We are growing as a business and as a marketing team and are now looking to hire a Senior Full Stack PHP developer to work within our Digital Products team, supporting our Head of Digital Products in collaborating with the dev agency and business stakeholders.
Our digital estate includes several revenue generating websites, applications, critical integrations and martech tools and requires a structured, outcomes focused and prioritised product development and management approach in order to respond to evolving business and user needs, enabling advocacy and growth.
We operate in a quality focused and yet fast paced, entrepreneurial environment and we have significant change to effect, therefore key skills are:
- Communication skills
- Business acumen – ability to balance working at tactical and strategic levels, ability to handle ambiguity and uncertainty, accountability and ownership
- Data driven decision making is also key; measuring outcomes, providing data-driven solutions which enable clear business impact
- Growth mindset; mastering hard and soft skills and thriving on finding answers and solutions with a bias for action.
We are looking for someone who thrives in filling up the white space - we don't have everything defined and need a lead developer to help us shape it all with us.
We have experienced significant growth, and we are evolving from being siloed product units to being integrated and focused on continuity of customer journeys.
- Our Word Press based websites have traditionally served B2B audiences (agents, university partners) and are now serving more and more B2C audiences (students) with both direct payment and lead generation functionalities required. Their users are located across all continents.
- We have several MarTech tools that we use on a regular basis, as well a few growth-focused applications.
- We also developed and still partly manage a few critical integrations.
We have a critical task of evolving our websites to fit the growing business’ needs; we need to actively assess our tech stack and consider best ways to consolidate websites (where relevant and possible). All this needs to come together to a pragmatic and actionable, yet growth minded, strategy that responds to and enables the business, commercial, brand and user objectives.
Main Duties and responsibilities
Technical Expertise
- Input into growth stack and wider websites infrastructure strategy that enables business growth and customer advocacy.
- Collaborate with the Head of Digital Products to interpret technical requirements and translate them into actionable user stories, issues, and tasks for the development team and external agencies, ensuring clear understanding and effective execution
- Lead and participate in code reviews and contribute to the improvement of the codebase
- Design, develop, and deploy scalable and efficient PHP applications using WordPress, Laravel, and other relevant technologies
- Write clean, modular, and well-documented code
- Serve as a subject matter expert for technical matters and provide guidance and advice on best practices, and emerging technologies
WordPress Management & Development
- Maintain, rationalise and optimise our WordPress applications for high performance, availability and security
- Develop custom WordPress plugins and templates to meet specific business requirements
- Vet all new deployments, including prepackaged plugins and themes, to ensure security and compliance before they go live on our web properties.
DevOps and Automation
- Implement automated testing and deployment scripts
- Apply DevOps practices to ensure continuous integration and delivery
- Provide guidance and oversight on project tasks and code quality to internal and external developers
Requirements:
- Significant experience in full-stack PHP development
- Proficient in WordPress, Laravel, Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP stack).
- Strong understanding of software development principles, patterns, and best practices
- Expert knowledge of WordPress core functions, APIs, theme and plugin development with significant hands-on experience
- Experience with agile development methods and version control systems (e.g. Git)
- Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to debug complex issues
- Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP etc.)
- Familiarity with PHP debugging tools (e.g., Xdebug, Zend Debugger)
- Understanding of web performance optimization, caching, and content delivery networks (CDNs)
- Understanding of web security best practices and WordPress security plugins (e.g., Wordfence, MalCare)
- Understanding of DevOps practices, continuous integration, and continuous deployment (CI/CD)
- Knowledge of security best practices, authentication, and authorization
- Experience with testing frameworks and automation (e.g., PHPUnit, Jest)
Nice to Have:
- Familiarity with front-end frameworks and libraries (e.g., React, Vue.js)
- Understanding of accessibility standards and best practices (e.g., WCAG 2.1)
Broader Competencies & Behaviours
Cross functional leadership skills
- Lead, influence, or guide other individuals, teams towards a successful outcome.
- Not just include and gain opinions, move along on the journey and get to the outcome, creating consensus.
Communication skills
- Understand and be able to communicate clearly trade-offs and choices
- Provide visibility of roadmap and enable stakeholders – business & dev - to see said trade-offs and choices
Empathy
- Connect with internal stakeholders’ challenges & deadlines
- Responsiveness and sense of urgency
- Customer empathy: put yourself in your customer's shoes and thinking from their perspective
Ability to effectively prioritise
- Trade-off between short-term wins vs long term vision
Business acumen
- Balance working at tactical and strategic levels
- Accountability and ownership
Growth mindset
- Master hard and soft skills keeping a growth mindset and proactive learning attitude.
- Thrive on finding answers and solutions
This job description is provided as a guide to the role. It is not intended to be an exhaustive description of duties and responsibilities and may be subject to periodic revision.
Oxford International is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. Recruitment checks, including checks with past employees, are undertaken in accordance with our Recruitment and Selection policy.
Oxford International is an equal opportunity employer. Every applicant and employee has the same opportunities regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status.
