Senior Developer

Job Description:

At Sykes Holiday Cottages, we are experiencing a significant increase in bookings due to a huge surge in demand for UK holidays. As such we are undergoing one of our biggest periods of growth to date and are actively seeking the best and brightest local talent to join us in our journey to connect 3 million happy holidaymakers with 35,000 holiday homes by 2023!

At Sykes Holiday Cottages, we are a business with big dreams and are bursting with ambition. We have pinned our sights on becoming the UK's number one holiday rental agency and will stop at nothing to reach our goal, combining our 27+ years of industry experience with our fierce company drive to become the best in the market for what we do. What started as a small family run company has now grown to be a 900 strong workforce of ambitious, passionate professionals spread across the UK, Ireland and New Zealand at a growing number of Regional Sister Brands and at our Chester head office.

Despite our success, our people and culture are what sets us apart from other businesses and has helped us earn our title as one of the Sunday Times’ ‘Best Companies to Work For’ for two years consecutive years. Our unique culture has remained intact since day one of our journey and is ingrained heavily in each and every one of our employees. We are truly proud of our five Company Values which are the foundations of every aspect of our business and remain at the heart of everything we do despite our rapid growth. By Achieving Together, Communicating Honestly, Growing and Learning, Earning Trust and Driving Innovation and Change, we remain true to our original ethos and ensure we stay true to our Customers, Owners and Colleagues alike.

Amongst our ongoing growth, we are now seeking our newest Senior Developer to join our 120 strong, award winning Technology department at our Chester HQ within a pivotal role in our team.

We are now seeking to appoint a dedicated and talented Senior Developer to our Technical department. As our newest Developer, you will be lending your skills to a whole host of national and international projects across the entire Sykes brand. On a daily basis you will be producing high quality code whilst working with the latest cloud and development technologies.

The successful candidate will throw themselves into our business-critical work, absorbing the wealth of technical experience around you to further your own growing tech skills and experience. We are looking for a truly ambitious Developer who will share in our passion for all things tech, who would jump at the chance to work collaboratively with our award-winning team of Developers, Testers, DevOps Engineers, Product Owners – all who eat, sleep and live all things tech. This truly is a fantastic opportunity for an experienced Senior Developer to take their next steps within our team, applying your technical skills to our ongoing projects, sharing your knowledge with the rest of the team, whilst taking on a new challenge within our senior tech team.

As our newest Senior Developer, you will report directly to our Solutions Architect and will have the following key skills:

Essential to have:

• At least five years’ experience of software engineering in a commercial setting;
• Experience of PHP MVC frameworks such as Laravel
• Experience of using Test Driven Development in commercial projects;
• Demonstrable record of delivering high-quality object-oriented code and using SOLID principles;
• A strong grasp of basic MySQL (joins, groups)
• Experience of foundational front-end technology e.g. JavaScript, HTML, CSS
• Experience of Agile development methodologies e.g. Scrum

Nice to have:

• Exposure to Continuous Delivery tools such as Bamboo or Jenkins
• Experience of a JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS, ReactJS or React Native
• Front-end styling frameworks such as SASS & Bootstrap
• Understanding of advanced MySQL (stored procedures)
• UNIX command line
• Experience with Amazon Web Services, ideally ECS
• An understanding of micro service architectures and experience with REST APIs
• Docker containers

Key Responsibilities

As our newest Senior Developer, you will be responsible for the following areas of accountability:

• Create well crafted, scalable and resilient solutions used both by colleagues and the public
• Own the delivery of software into the business
• Perform exploratory work to investigate new technologies that we can leverage to solve business problems, as well as well as sizing changes to our existing platform.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to clarify ambiguous requirements and taking corrective action for issues in production.
• Conduct sprint planning to deliver regular iterations and retrospectives to improve our processes.
• Facilitate daily stand ups to ensure team and business alignment.
• Line manage a team of developers, conduct one-to-ones, manage probationary periods and ensure growth and training needs are met.
• Promote software development best practices.
• Review colleagues’ code submissions, coach enhancements, encourage standards and identify bugs.

Please note: The working hours for this position are 37.5 per week to be worked Monday - Friday, 9am - 5.30pm.

Hybrid Working: Sykes Cottages are proud to support hybrid-working across the business with a mixture or remote and office working available and will be discussed at interview