Company overview:

Acquia is leading the open source revolution, fueling the growth of Drupal, which drives some of the most powerful websites across the globe: Twitter, Paypal, MTV, Sony Music and over a million others. Acquia’s been named by Forbes as one of the top 100 companies to watch and is one of the fastest growing software companies in the world. 

The career opportunity:

We're looking for a developer to help us create the ultimate Drupal distribution for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 that captures best practices and features/functionality optimized for enterprise site development. The <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/lightning">Lightning</a> distribution is free open source/GPL software on Drupal.org, which will be used as a platform by our professional services group, pre-sales group, and implementation partners for further customization. The intent is for Lightning to provide a unified approach to site building and eliminate tedious configuration for "table stakes" end-user functionality such as customizable layouts, commerce, multilingual, media, and content authoring, as well as ensuring configuration that affects performance, scalability, and security is set up correctly out-of-the-box. This allows our various teams to stay focused on the cool stuff that's unique to the site / demo they're creating.

Sites from the biggest brands in the world, to the sub shop around the corner will use the tools and interfaces you build to manage their sites. Every tweak and improvement you make will alter the way that thousands of users get Drupal sites out into the world.

Key responsibilities:

• Work under the direction of the Lightning product manager to fix bugs, pre-configure settings, and add new features/functionality, both within the distribution, in contributed projects, and in core.
• Fix critical Drupal 8 issues, and port key contributed modules in order to ensure a Lightning MVP by Drupal 8's release date.
• Work closely with various stakeholders to determine their needs and use cases, and evaluate different approaches, choosing a single unified approach that Lightning will provide by default for each site building challenge, including specific modules, configuration, and customization.
• Architect improvements to the distribution in a highly de-coupled way, so that specific functionality can be easily turned off/on for a given site build / demo.
• Perform performance benchmarking that ensures Lightning scales well to sites with thousands of concurrent users and pieces of content.
• Develop behaviour-driven tests on all end-user facing functionality, to ensure that regressions are not introduced with future changes.
• Contribute to and adhere to a predictable release management cycle, including an upgrade path, and capture key changes in release notes.

The candidate profile:

Our ideal candidate is has ample experience building enterprise websites with Drupal, and is either fluent in both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 development, or is able to come up to speed on Drupal 8 quickly. Experience with enterprise challenges such as performance, scalability, and behavior-driven development is also very important.

The team is a highly motivated one that takes ownership of the tasks they’ve been given. Work is done in a highly collaborative nature with solutions constantly being discussed and feedback being given without ego in frequent code reviews.

Technical:

• Proven enterprise-level Drupal site-building experience, particularly in the areas of performance, security, and reliability.
• Proven experience building and maintaining a Drupal distribution, specifically around architecting highly de-coupled functionality for maximum customizability.
• Built and maintained modules in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
• Experience with OO code written in PHP.
• Experience with Behat testing.
• Experience with API integrations, have built systems that either provide or consume REST services

Personal:

• Experience interacting and problem-solving with the Drupal community in issue queues and IRC.
• Excellent organization and communication skills
• Strong attention to detail, astute diagnostic skills
• Ability to solve issues with clear methods while knowing when to take intuitive leaps
• Strategic and forward planning thought process
• Able to guide technical discussions with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Ability to partner with internal/external key stakeholders and negotiate mutually agreeable outcomes
• A passion for the web, open source development and for helping Acquia to continue to build a hot and growing global start-up

Desirable:

• In-depth knowledge of Drupal 8 core APIs, such as bootstrap/routing system, plugin system, entities and fields, and configuration system.
• Knowledge of Drupal's enterprise competitors, such as Adobe CQ5 and Sitecore.
• Advanced knowledge of JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, AJAX, and DOM manipulation
• Deep understanding of web standards and best practices (HTML5/CSS3)
• Experience utilizing Symfony components
• Experience with developing solid back-end API/REST support for "headless Drupal" installations with custom JS or mobile application front-ends.

Commitment from Acquia – Corporate benefits & career development strategy

Acquia believes in career progression and is focused on promoting employee success, personal growth and development. Aligned to long-term employee career growth there are defined career roadmaps and employee enablement programme.

Acquia also provides an outstanding benefits package to support employee wellbeing - including private healthcare (personal & family), share options scheme, bonus structure and life assurance/critical illness policy.