AKA: Mid-Level Full-Stack Developer (PHP / WordPress)

About AKA

AKA is a global entertainment agency working primarily with theatre, alongside museums, attractions, visitor destinations and live entertainment more broadly.

About the team

You would join the Digital department, a team of over 60 people across Digital Media, Digital Product Development, and Data & Insights. The Digital Product Development team pairs designers with developers to ship websites, web apps, campaign builds and emails for some of the best known shows and cultural institutions in the world.

The role

You will sit in the development team, working across the full stack with a back-end bias. This is a hands-on delivery role with room to grow towards senior. You will be trusted with your own projects early, with support from senior developers and the Lead Designer on the product side.

What you will do

• Build, deploy and maintain websites and web applications, front-end and back-end.

• Maintain and improve our cloud Linux infrastructure.

• Support front-end developers with local environments and tooling.

• Keep our development and deployment processes healthy, including CI/CD pipelines.

• Work with designers to pressure-test whether designs are feasible, and propose alternatives where they are not.

• Produce development estimates for back-end work.

• Build HTML marketing emails on occasion.

• Meet internal stakeholders to scope requirements and report progress.

• Train clients on the sites you have built, on occasion.

What we are looking for

Essential

• Solid object-oriented PHP (8.x).

• Strong WordPress experience, including custom theme and plugin development.

• Experience with at least one MVC framework (Laravel, Symfony).

• Consuming and building REST APIs.

• Ability to maintain Linux web servers (nginx or Apache, php-fpm, MySQL).

• Confident with HTML, modern CSS and JavaScript (ES6+).

• Git, including branching and code review workflow.

• Comfortable working from Figma files and extracting assets.

Useful

• TypeScript and React or Next.js. A growing share of our product work is built this way and there is scope to move further in that direction.

• Docker or another containerised local development setup.

• Modern build tooling (Vite, webpack).

• A CSS framework such as Tailwind, or a preprocessor such as Sass.

• CI/CD with GitHub Actions or similar.

• Cloud platform experience (AWS, Cloudflare).

• Automated testing (PHPUnit, Playwright).

• Accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA). Much of our client base has a legal and moral obligation here, so it matters to us.

How you work

We care as much about approach as about stack. We are looking for someone who digs into problems rather than waiting to be handed a solution, communicates clearly with non-technical colleagues, works well to campaign deadlines, and wants to be a senior developer in a few years.

Benefits

• 25 days holiday

• ‘Telus Health’ EAP scheme for you and your family. Giving you access to free independent advice on Life, Health, Family, Money and Work matters

• Holiday Buy Back

• Friends & Family Theatre Ticket

• New Business Incentives

• Recruitment Incentives

• Pension Scheme*

• Interest Free Travel Loan*

• Ride to Work Scheme*

• Childcare Vouchers*

• Death in Service

• Flexible/Hybrid Working

• Critical Illness

• Enhanced Parental Leave