Senior Drupal Developer

Nice to meet you. We’re Soapbox. We’re a creative studio for ideas that matter. We work with forward-thinking organisations to turn knowledge and evidence into social progress. From artificial intelligence to international development, early childhood to climate change, our clients’ work focuses on some of the most important issues of our time.

We’re looking for a highly accomplished back-end web developer who wants to work on innovative projects that make a real difference. In this role, you’ll be responsible for part of our growing development team, implementing solutions to complex technical problems and ensuring our work always meets Drupal standards.

About you:

• You have extensive knowledge and experience with Drupal, advanced PHP, and MySQL.
• Experience with the other tools is optional but considered a bonus: WordPress, Symfony, Laravel, and other PHP tools.
• Git, Bash, GNU Make, various command line tools, and Apache/nginx servers, DDEV.
• Good understanding of advanced object-oriented PHP, namespacing, dependency injection, etc.
• You are happy reviewing others’ code as well as producing your own, but you’re not afraid to share thorny issues with colleagues to work out an optimal solution together.
• You stay on top of new trends and innovations in web development and find ways to apply them to your work.
• You have the confidence and communication skills to engage directly with clients and to explain your proposed solutions to them.
• You must have fluent written and spoken English.

It would also be nice if:

• You want to put your skills to work for good, helping socially progressive organisations to communicate online.
• You have some experience working for not-for-profit clients.

What you’ll be doing:

You will work as part of our in-house team of developers, led by our Director of Web Design & Development and three technical leads (WordPress, Drupal, and Front-end leads). You will also collaborate closely with other colleagues, including project managers, digital designers, and content strategists.

The main focus of the job is to develop the back end of new websites and other digital products, as well as update existing websites, both in terms of maintenance as well as new functionality. Most of our digital projects involve the delivery of an organisation’s main website, but we also build smaller sites and other products, including our products like AI Search, Page to PDF via Puppeteer, etc. You can see many examples of our past work on our website. On occasion, you may work in the support desk on a rotational basis across the development team.

We expect all our staff to act autonomously and take responsibility for their projects, with support when they need it, of course, so they can feel a personal sense of accomplishment when we complete a piece of work. You’ll generally be working on one major project at a time, seeing it through to completion, and there may be times when you are responsible for smaller chunks of work on existing sites through the ‘Continuous Improvement’ packages we offer our clients.

About us:

We are a flexible and fair employer, and our values run through everything we do, from the clients we work with to the way we treat our staff. This has helped us to build a close-knit, hard-working, and ambitious team. Many of our colleagues have worked with us for a large part of their careers, advancing professionally over their years with us. And our growing roster of clients includes many of the world’s leading charities, NGOs, and research organisations.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and know that including employees with a diverse range of perspectives and experiences will improve the quality and creativity of the services we provide. We particularly welcome applications from candidates who are members of groups that are currently underrepresented at Soapbox, including LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and people from minority ethnic and religious communities.

Our studios:

The role may be based in either of our two UK studios – in London or Bath – depending on the successful applicant’s preference. Almost all our employees now have the option of hybrid working (splitting their time between home and the studio), and we are willing to consider candidates for this role who want to work fully remotely (based in the UK or elsewhere). We will also be happy to consider requests for other forms of flexible working, such as reduced or compressed hours. (Our normal working week is 37.5 hours split equally over five days.) Although we sit in lots of different places, we work as one global team, collaborating across borders and time zones.

What we offer:

• A starting holiday allowance of 25 days per year (increasing by 1 additional day for every 5 years of service) plus bank holidays based on your residing country, 3 days of Christmas shutdown with the option to repurpose to another religious festival, and of course, your birthday off.
• 2 fully paid volunteer days per year.
• Work from anywhere for four weeks a year.
• Flexible, hybrid working – we ask that you attend one of our studios a minimum of two days per week.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, and neonatal pay.
• Generous company sick pay.
• Health Cash Plan (with the option to enhance or add a partner after 3 years).
• Matched pension contributions (increases with tenure).
• Additional long-service rewards.
• Cycle Scheme.
• Personal development and progression plans with a learning & development budget.
• Quarterly company get-togethers, including our annual summer and winter socials.
• Regular employee well-being perks such as bring your dog to the office, store, and online discounts, barista-quality coffee, and free fruit and snacks.