Junior Developer

Junior Developer - Alph4

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer Location: Fully remote (distributed team) Type: Full-time, permanent Hours: 09:00 – 17:00, Monday to Friday (UK time) Salary: Negotiable

About the Role

We're looking for a Junior Developer to join Alph4's engineering team. You'll work on our platform alongside a small, senior group: the kind of team where your code gets reviewed properly, your questions get answered, and you're trusted with real work from early on.

This is a genuine junior role. We're not hiring for what you already know about our particular stack: we'll teach you all of it. We're hiring for how fast you learn and how well you keep yourself moving when nobody is looking over your shoulder.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain features in our PHP/Laravel codebase and some Ruby on Rails.
• Write and optimise SQL against PostgreSQL, from everyday queries to the occasional gnarly one
• Work with containerised services in local development and in our Azure environments
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines: you'll break them occasionally, and you'll learn to fix them
• Pick up tickets in Jira, take part in sprint planning, stand-ups, and retros
• Review other people's code and have yours reviewed: this is how you'll learn fastest here

Requirements

You'll need at least one of these (ideally both):

• Previous programming experience in any language, from any context. Commercial work, a degree or bootcamp, a serious side project, freelance work, or code you wrote because you wanted to. We don't mind what language. We mind that you've built things and debugged them.
• Previous Agile project work: you've worked in sprints, on a delivery team, with a backlog and a board. That doesn't have to be a commercial job: a bootcamp capstone, a university group project, or an open-source project run in sprints all count. What we're looking for is that you've delivered alongside other people to a plan, not only on your own.

One of these is enough. Both is better, and it shows up in where you land in the salary band. If you've only got one, say so plainly (it won't count against you, and we'd rather know than guess).

And, whichever route you come in on:

• Self-motivating. This is the one that matters most. Remote work means nobody is going to hover. You need to be able to pick up a task, get unstuck on your own where you can, and ask for help early where you can't.
• Clear written communication. Distributed teams run on writing. You'll be explaining your thinking in tickets, PRs, and chat far more than in meetings.
• Comfortable being new. You'll not know things constantly for your first six months. The people who do well here say "I don't understand this yet" out loud on day one and mean it.
• Curious. The stack will change under you. That should sound like fun, not a threat.

The stack you'll learn:

• PHP and Laravel: our main application framework
• PostgreSQL: where the data lives, and where you'll learn to write SQL that doesn't fall over
• Containers: Docker containers locally, and in our deployed environments
• CI/CD pipelines: automated build, test, and deploy
• Microsoft Azure: our cloud platform
• Jira and Agile sprints: how the work gets planned and shipped

If you've already used some of these, great: you'll move faster at the start, and it'll be reflected in where you land in the salary band. If you've never touched any of them but you meet one of the requirements above, apply anyway. We'd rather teach a fast learner our stack than hire someone who already knows it and stops there.

What We Don't Require

A computer science degree (but it's a plus) Prior knowledge of PHP, Laravel, SQL, containers, Azure, or anything else on the stack list

We mean this. If you're reading the stack section and recognising none of it, but you've written code or you've delivered in sprints alongside other people, please apply.

What you'll get:

• £xxx, depending on how much of the stack you already bring. Starting with none of it doesn't disqualify you: it just starts you nearer the bottom of the band, and we'll tell you plainly where you've landed and why.
• Direct mentorship from the CTO and senior engineers
• Fully remote working with a distributed team
• Predictable hours: 09:00 to 17:00, and we mean it. We're not a company that treats evenings as spare capacity.
• Real ownership of real features, quickly

If you're interested, tell us about something you taught yourself: what it was, why you started, and what you got stuck on. Any subject, technical or not. That note matters more to us than your CV. If the timing's wrong or it's not for you, a one-line reply saying so is welcome and won't offend anyone. And if someone else springs to mind, please do pass this on. Alph4 is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from everyone, regardless of background.