Position: Backend PHP Developer (Mid - Senior)
Company: Freelance
Category: PHP
Experience required: no_exp
Published: 2020-01-01T00:00:00+02:00

Baja Bikes is originally a Dutch company, established in 2005 in Barcelona. Its headquarter is still based in this beautiful Spanish city. Throughout the year we organize bike tours, bike rental, city walks, sightseeing excursions and GPS routes daily, for individuals and groups.

1. What are you working on? What is the product?
https://www.bajabikes.eu/ 
Baja Bikes is an e-commerce company that sells bicycle tours in hundreds of cities around the world. We work with suppliers in each city who then provide the tours. We have our own proprietary platform for the public, administration, blog, suppliers, and agents. 
 
2. Why is this product interesting or important? What is its value proposition?
We are a small remote team that works closely to develop the best solutions for the business. The management understands clearly that technology drives the business and allows the freedom to choose the best tech for each problem, and also the time needed to pay down on technical debt. 
 
3. What technology is being used?
Our core language is PHP with the Laravel framework, however, we are slowly migrating to Symfony. The architecture is micro-service based, and we are about to introduce a messaging system and RPC for inter-service communication. The client-side technology is VueJS which is rapidly replacing the jQuery cdoebase.  The public website is a mix of WordPress for static content pages, and VueJS for all dynamic pages. DevOps incorporates Gitab with Docker on Kubernetes and Terraform. We host in the cloud on a mixture of Digital Ocean and AWS. 
 
4. What to do in the project?
- to work with the team on the development of our products
- to maintain and extend the unit tests
- to review code and mentor junior developers

5. What kind of skills are needed?
- PHP (Laravel or Symfony)
- Unit testing experience
- Ideally exposure to pub/sub and microservices 
- Fluent English and excellent communication skills
 
6. How are we (as a company / product) different from others? Why should I work on this project?
We are a small team who are friends and work closely together. Your efforts will make a direct contribution to the products we deliver. You will have a strong voice in determining how things are designed and built. 
 
7. Why is this position open? 
We are expanding! 
 
8. What is the size and structure of the team?
We have a small team of 6 at the moment:
- Principal Engineer
- Senior Developer
- DevOps Engineer (part-time, looking for a full-time replacement)
- Full-stack developer
- Junior full-stack developer
- CTO
 
9. How old is this product / project? What stage is it currently at?
The project is 10 years old, however, the current systems are about 3 years old when we moved to micro-services. This process was done rapidly in a start-up fashion, we are now reviewing all systems and adding professionalism to them, paying back technical debt by re-architecting and re-writing core components. 
 
10. Where are the people making technical / architectural decisions based?
Between Ukraine and Spain. 
 
11. Is there an opportunity to travel? Where?
Yes, we hold get-togethers in Kyiv and Barcelona. 

 12. How will the interview take place (who will conduct, how many stages)?

An initial technical call with a peer.
A quick online test (40 minutes)
A second call with the CTO.