Backend Symfony Developer

Duties & Responsibilities:

As a Developer for the VCU Enterprise Research Administration (ERA) systems, you will play a key role in supporting and enhancing the research enterprise. This includes helping us build our new unified ERA system, ONEeRA. Our systems facilitate critical processes, including grant submission and management, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) protocol management, conflict of interest management, export control, and research service billing/invoicing.

In addition to application development, this role includes a DevOps component focused on building, maintaining, and improving our containerised developer experience and delivery pipelines (primarily Docker and Docker Compose). You will partner closely with campus IT to ensure reliable operations for our services.

This position will:

• Develop and maintain the ONEeRA system by implementing technical specifications, writing new code, and improving existing functionality.
• Collaborate with analysts and stakeholders to design, build, and iterate on new products and features.
• Enhance user experience by identifying and implementing improvements to the overall product.
• Assist in developing new applications and functions, ensuring all code is accessible, maintainable, and scalable.
• Write clean, efficient PHP (using Symfony), JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, following best practices and standards.
• Build and support containerised local, development, and test environments, along with CI/CD workflows and release packaging.
• Coordinate with campus IT on server management and maintenance, and work together to ensure robust logging, monitoring, and the overall performance and availability of ERA services.

Required Qualifications:

• Only candidates who do not require current or future sponsorship for employment will be considered.
• Proven experience building PHP/Symfony web applications.
• Experience working with Docker and Docker Compose in day-to-day development.
• Strong understanding of user-friendly design principles and performance optimisation for software components.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Practical experience containerising applications (Dockerfiles, multi-stage builds, image hardening) and orchestrating services with Docker Compose.
• Reasonable Linux command-line proficiency and comfort working with logs, environment variables, and service configuration.
• Understanding of dependency management and reproducible builds (Composer, Yarn).
• A self-motivated attitude, with a passion for continuous learning and sharing knowledge with the team.
• Demonstrated experience working in or a commitment to fostering an inclusive environment for diverse faculty, staff, and students.
• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrated ability to work in and foster an environment of respect, professionalism and civility with a population of faculty, staff, and students from all backgrounds and experiences, or a commitment to do so as a staff member at VCU.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with automated testing and unit testing frameworks.
• Experience using CI/CD (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitbucket Pipelines, or similar) to build, test, and package code.
• Experience maintaining CI pipelines that run linters, static analysis (e.g., PHPStan), security/vuln scans, and test suites.
• Basic database operations for dev/test (MariaDB/MySQL), and experience with caches/queues (Redis, Beanstalkd) in containers.
• Familiarity with research administration processes or experience in a university research environment.

Benefits:

All full-time university staff are eligible for VCU’s robust benefits package that includes comprehensive health benefits, paid annual and holiday leave granted up front, generous tuition benefits, retirement planning and savings options, tax-deferred annuity and cash match programs, employee discounts, well-being resources, abundant opportunities for career development and advancement, and more.