PHP​/Symfony Developer

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Unit: VP Research MBU

Department: Research Information Sys

Department Summary:

At the VCU Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, our mission is to foster transformative research, discovery and innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University through excellence in service. We partner with faculty in all schools and departments as they seek funding, plan studies, establish collaborations, calculate budgets, submit grant applications, negotiate industry contracts, and secure patents and licensing agreements.

Our commitment to supporting and elevating the research community at VCU has resulted in record levels of sponsored research and has placed VCU among the nation’s premier public research universities. Through our passion for discovery and willingness to take on challenges, we continue to advance the work that matters most and position the university as a national leader in research, innovation, creativity and scholarship.

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 Dev Ops 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, 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…