About the Role
Hands-on PHP CodeIgniter Developer to join the AdwitAds engineering team — a high-volume print advertising production platform serving 60+ publications across North America, with related products in compliance, billing, and consumer brands. This is a builder role: you ship production code, own problems end-to-end, and use modern AI tooling to multiply your output without compromising quality.
Experience & Technical Expertise
- 3+ years of professional PHP development; 2+ years on CodeIgniter 3 in production.
- Strong PHP 7.x / 8.x — OOP, traits, namespaces, exception handling, type hints.
- Deep CI3 — controllers, models, libraries, helpers, hooks, routing, sessions, form validation, Query Builder.
- Clean MVC discipline — no business logic in views, no SQL in controllers, modular and reusable code.
- Strong MySQL — schema design, JOINs, indexing, query optimisation against tables with 100k+ rows.
- Comfortable with REST APIs, JavaScript / jQuery, HTML5, CSS3 / Bootstrap, and Git workflows.
- Familiarity with Linux/AWS, cron jobs, log debugging, and basic deployment.
- Bonus: exposure to Java Spring MVC, JSP, or React — our stack spans these layers.
Understanding the Requirements
Writing code is the easy part. The harder part is understanding what to build. You restate every brief in your own words before coding, ask clarifying questions early about edge cases and failure modes, and translate business language (designers should claim orders, variable pay should account for holidays) into precise technical specs — tables, fields, states, validations, and API contracts. You push back constructively when an approach will create technical debt or a poor user experience.
Prompt Engineering & AI-Assisted Development
This is non-negotiable. Every developer on our team is fluent with AI coding tools.
- Prior, demonstrable usage of AI tools is a must — Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, or equivalent. You should be able to show real examples of code or scripts produced with their help.
- You write structured prompts — context, constraints, examples, expected output — not vague requests.
- You critically review every line of AI-generated code; you do not paste it blindly.
- You use AI for scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, tests, and documentation — but you do not outsource judgement to it.
- You actively guard against hallucinated APIs, insecure code, and leaked credentials.
Attitude, Personality, Discipline, Attention to Detail, Accountability
These words appear in every JD and are usually undefined. Here is exactly what we mean.
- Attitude — the default posture you bring to work. We want a problem-solver, not a problem-reporter. You stay calm under pressure, treat feedback as data, and assume good faith from teammates.
- Personality — how you show up with others. Direct but respectful, curious but humble, confident without being arrogant. You can disagree without making it personal and explain technical concepts without being condescending.
- Discipline — doing the right thing when no one is watching. Writing the test when the deadline is tight. Following the coding standard with no reviewer. Committing in small, reviewable chunks instead of one Friday-evening dump.
- Attention to Detail — the muscle that catches a missing semicolon, a hard-coded URL, an off-by-one, a typo on a customer-facing label — before they reach production. In print, billing, and compliance, a single wrong character costs real money.
- Accountability — owning the outcome, not just the activity. I wrote the code is activity. The feature is live and the user is happy is outcome. When something breaks at 9 PM and it was your code, you respond. Missed deadline You tell your manager early, with a revised plan.
What You Will Be Doing
- Build and maintain features in our CI3 codebase — orders, designer queue, billing, classification, reporting.
- Write optimised MySQL queries against large tables; build REST endpoints; integrate with React / JSP front-ends.
- Use AI tools daily and demonstrate measurable productivity gains because of them.
- Participate in code reviews; investigate and fix production bugs end-to-end, including post-mortems.
How to Apply
Send a short note (not a generic cover letter) covering: (1) one CodeIgniter project you are proud of and what made it hard, (2) two specific examples of how you have used AI tools in real coding work — what you prompted, what you got, and how you validated it, and (3) a link to your GitHub if available.
