Digital Spy is seeking a Developer to join our technical team as we progress with our ambitious plans for growth in Britain and around the world.

About Digital Spy:
Digital Spy is one of the UK's largest entertainment and media news websites, with more than 105 million page impressions a month and a unique audience of 5.6 million (August 2009, Google Analytics). The site is home to one of the busiest internet discussion forums in the world.

The position: We are looking for a Developer to join our technical team, working on both front-end and back-end code and design. The ideal candidate will relish joining a small, hard-working, editorially-focused technical team and be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about our content. Recent graduates may find the position particularly appealing.

The developer will be required to work 9am to 5pm UK time Monday to Friday. Some out of hours and Saturday working may be required from time to time. The position is based at our headquarters near Marble Arch in central London.

About Digital Spy's Technical Setup:
Digital Spy runs on nearly 30 servers spread across two sites in central London. All of our web servers, which make up most of the 30 machines, run our preferred web serving OS, FreeBSD. Our MySQL database cluster runs on multiple nodes, each running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a clustering solution provided by Continuent, Inc. The technologies we use extensively are:
- FreeBSD
- Apache
- PHP
- MySQL
- memcached

Our content management system is purpose built for Digital Spy, managing everything from articles to the site's layout. Our forums run on an extensively customised version of Jelsoft's vBulletin software. The successful candidate will work across these systems.

Scalability, ease of use and direct relevance to our editorial output and business goals are core ideals governing our development efforts.

Your Skills:
The successful candidate will:
- be proficient with procedural and object-oriented PHP5, including interacting with MySQL using the MySQLi extension
- be familiar with memcache and its two PECL extensions for PHP5
- be capable of producing clean, modular, easily extendable and reusable code
- have extensive experience with hand-coded, valid XHTML
- have extensive experience with consistent, clean, efficient CSS
- have a thorough grounding in XML

Some experience administering FreeBSD and RHEL servers with particular regard to Apache and PHP is desirable.

Application
To apply, candidates must:
- enclose a CV together with a covering letter outlining their suitability for the role with specific, strong references to each of the skills points above
- submit a short summary of Digital Spy demonstrating knowledge and familiarity with the site and its content
- submit, if one exists, a link to a web portfolio of previous work

Completed applications should be sent to dev0909 [at] digitalspy.co.uk

PLEASE NOTE: Applications that do not include a CV and the other required submissions will NOT be considered.