About the company

We are a fast growing German startup that produces custom personalized shirts built to order in Thailand and then shipped to our customers abroad. At every step in the process, customers can keep track of their shirt through their phone and have input into their order.

Our shirts are sold exclusively via direct sales through a network of consultants - which is why we can afford to sell our shirts at such an attractive price and also provide an ethical workplace for our manufacturing workers in Asia - our workers are treated to above average pay, high standard of cleanliness, free drinks, food subsidies etc.

Backend Developer

It's true that the on-going pandemic is causing problems for businesses of all sizes not least startups like Befeni. But we have managed to have an interesting year despite the occasional setback.

To continue building our product at the speed our business is growing, we need to start the new year by increasing the size of our web development team. Specifically we are looking for a Backend Developer to join the team.

Our development team has a number of interesting of challenges. They currently maintain a legacy PHP application but in the new year, they will start a much awaited ground up rewrite of this application. This will involve working with people across the business to come up with specifications, designing the architecture that the business will rely upon for the next few years and writing clean code that is not bogged down by legacy decisions and considerations.

We are big proponents of documentation and proper planning phases so if you have worked in chaotic environments in the past, this could be a welcome reprieve.

If you like meaty challenges, you might appreciate the fact that we have no baggage in terms of stack or framework and you and your future colleagues would be deciding what we eventually end up using.

Unfortunately we do have other legacy applications to maintain but they are in a much better state. For example there is the application which controls our production facility in Thailand. It is based on a core set of APIs and a front-end application which gives the product managers and staff a birds eye view of what is happening in the factory. We have scanning devices and other projects which consumes those APIs and we are about to add a bunch of IoT devices to measure performance levels of employees.

If you join at the right time, you will be involved in the building of those IoT devices so the workload at Befeni is not always about non-stop coding! Sometimes we mix it up!

Later down the line there are opportunities to use machine learning on the vast amounts of data we produce to see if we can learn new insights about our business and improve the efficiency of the factory.

We have a huge network of sales agents and you will be building tools to help improve their lives and make a measurable impact on the growth of the business - so if you have entrenepenual minded ambitions, you'll find a lot of like-minded souls on our development team.

In terms of work environment, we are remote friendly. We have colleagues in the United States, Europe and Northern Africa so we are not concerned where you work from as long as you are great at communicating. If you are living in Bangkok or would like to move to Thailand we can help with securing a visa and moving here.

We are slowly working towards becoming more agile (it is a process which involves educating the entire company) but we are not dogmatic about it.

We do regular sprint retrospectives and all IT team members have performance reviews to set goals and track their progress every three months. If you are looking to be more hands on with your career, you will find that Befeni is a great place to work on exciting new challenges with responsibility and opportunities to prove your abilities in abundance!

Responsibilities & Skills

- This is a senior development role so whilst we do not specify how many years experience you need to have, it goes without saying you ought to be able to write clean object orientated PHP code with or without a PHP framework. Bonus points for being good at shell scripting or experience with other languages such as NodeJS or Python.

- We use Laravel exclusively for our new projects so it would be nice if you are already familiar with it. Our older legacy project uses a home brew PHP framework. In both cases you will be working with oodles of code you have not written yourself so you should be able to handle this without falling to pieces - we will allow you the occasional curse though!

- As a senior developer you will have used a variety of relational / document based databases and you should be able to write and debug MySQL queries, find performance bottlenecks and if you have some experience in tuning databases and managing servers, even better because pre-pandemic we were having all sorts of performance issues.

- We use version control and our tech lead likes people that can use Git efficiently. If you are familiar with rebasing, cherry-picking, practice micro-commiting, write descriptive commits etc, you will fit in perfectly. Otherwise your first month will be spent in bootcamp.

- You should have experience with building REST based APIs for large scale applications. In fact we are just looking for general "advanced" developer experience like knowing when to use a queue or event/message system, how well you can apply design patterns and whether or not you can be pragmatic about how much abstraction is needed in a piece of code you are writing.

- Our test coverage is appalling at the moment but we are factoring that into future sprint estimates and making it our new year's resolution so you will ideally you will have exposure to mocks, stubbing etc and be ready to help improve our unit tests.

As part of a team, you will be doing code reviews for your peers and occasional pair programming to share information and maintain a healthy energetic approach to work.

- We use Docker but we need some help introducing CI, automated deployments and we are missing some dev-ops experience... do you have strong Linux/command line chops and experience with AWS and other cloud hosting providers? Can you help us make our development workflow better?

- You should be able to work within an agile team and have a basic understanding of what that will involve: estimations, planning, standups etc