Playniac is an indie interactive and games company based in London and making exciting projects on the web and new platforms such as iPhone and social networks. We work with a variety of high profile brands and clients to create great playful experiences.
The Senior Web Developer is responsible for the architecture, development and maintenance of game back-end systems and web sites. The will take a lead role in analyzing requirements, authoring specifications, ensuring that all development work meets specifications and working closely with the director, internal team and clients to push projects forwards.
Its an exciting time to join this small and growing company, with the opportunity to really create an impact with your skills and gain experience in a variety of areas, becoming a key player in the organisation and working on some high profile projects in 2010 and beyond.
YOU ARE:
• Passionate about playing and making games.
• Someone with ambition who works with enthusiasm and creativity to deliver excellent results.
• Able to work autonomously both in the office and remotely, taking care of your responsibilities and tasks reliably and consistently. Self-motivated with a strong work ethic.
• A great coder who really cares about elegant solutions, beautiful code and efficient design.
• Someone who knows how to deliver great results, exceed expectations and pull the proverbial rabbit out of the proverbial hat when necessary.
Responsibilities
• Actively participate in finalizing technical requirements, designing robust, scaleable systems and authoring specifications using Microsoft Word and other documentation tools
• Design, build and maintain back-end systems for Flash / iPhone / Facebook games
• Design, build and maintain systems for user accounts, game scoring, player ranking, game data and logic, etc.
• Perform and oversee launches and updates; manage development process
• Integrate and develop with a range of technologies, platforms and APIs such as SmartFox, Facebook and Wordpress
• Meet with clients to understand their needs and discuss technical solutions
• Evaluate your code to ensure that it is optimized, thoroughly documented, properly structured, meets industry standards and is compatible with browsers, devices or operating systems. Use best practices for OOP and code reusability.
• Develop and implement test plans including alpha, beta and unit testing.
ESSENTIAL
• 5+ years of experience in the field
• Excellent understanding of and experience with LAMP.
• Excellent skills in object-oriented PHP and use of PHP frameworks such as Cake or CodeIgniter
• Excellent skills in designing and building robust database solutions using MySQL, and/or PostgresSQL.
• Significant work experience in a digital agency environment or games company.
• Server setup and administration; Linux/Unix command line knowledge
• Build and maintain web sites using HTML/XHTML, AJAX, CSS. W3C compliancy. Use of JavaScript frameworks such as Scriptaculous or JQuery
• Experience with online bug and task tracking tools
• First class commercial portfolio, working on PHP and MySQL projects and games
• Basic image manipulation and exporting images for web in Adobe Photoshop
• Use of SVN version control
• Some experience with SmartFox multi-user server
• Some experience with Facebook applications and Facebook Connect
• Some experience customising WordPress templates to maintain and develop the company web site
• Any experience with Adobe Flash, Actionscript 3, iPhone, C, Objective-C a bonus.
• Fluent in English and impeccable written and oral communication skills;