About Science of Sport
Science of Sport is a nonprofit organization that uses sports to help young people develop stronger academic, STEM, and life skills.Our programs combine in-person learning experiences, curriculum, professional development, digital platforms, real sports data, and interactive activities to make education more relevant and engaging for young people.As we expand, digital products will play an increasingly important role in how students, educators, families, partners, and communities experience Science of Sport.Position
Overview
Science of Sport is seeking a part-time Mid-Level Laravel Developer to support the development and improvement of our growing digital product ecosystem.This includes:
- The Science of Sport public website
- Learning management and curriculum-delivery systems
- STEM Replay and other sports-based learning platforms
- Interactive games and digital activities for young people
- Educator, student, family, and organizational partner experiences
- Administrative dashboards and internal operating tools
- Data integrations, reporting systems, and digital impact measurement
- Future digital products connecting sports, education, and technology
This is primarily a backend development position focused on Laravel/PHP, REST APIs, MySQL, third-party integrations, background processing, and AWS-hosted services. However, the developer should be comfortable contributing across different digital products and understanding how backend decisions affect the complete user experience.The developer will work closely with our technical lead and collaborate with product, UX/UI, curriculum, operations, marketing, and quality-assurance contributors.The successful candidate will be able to understand an existing application, translate defined requirements into reliable features, investigate production issues, and complete assigned work with appropriate independence. Major architectural decisions and complex infrastructure changes will be made in alignment with the technical lead.
Position: Mid-Level Laravel Developer — Digital Products
Schedule: Part-time, approximately [15–20 hours per week]
Location: Los Angeles
Employment Type: Part-Time
Reports To: Technical Lead
Compensation: $40-$45 an hour
Digital Products and Projects
The developer may contribute to several existing and future initiatives, including:Science of Sport Website
- Improve website functionality, performance, reliability, and integrations.
- Build forms, content-management features, lead-generation workflows, and partner-facing experiences.
- Connect website activity with internal systems, reporting tools, and communication platforms.
- Support future registration, payment, donation, event, and program-discovery functionality.
Learning Management System
- Improve how educators and students access courses, curriculum, videos, assessments, and learning resources.
- Develop user roles, permissions, enrollments, progress tracking, reporting, and content-management functionality.
- Support customized learning experiences for schools, sports organizations, and community partners.
- Improve administrator tools for managing users, content, organizations, and program access.
STEM Replay and Sports-Based Learning Platforms
- Support platforms that transform real sports data and game moments into educational experiences.
- Integrate sports-data feeds and other external information sources.
- Build systems for question delivery, user responses, scoring, feedback, recommendations, progress, badges, and reporting.
- Improve automated content workflows, data verification, and quality-control systems.
- Support expansion across sports, subjects, grade bands, and partner experiences.
Interactive Youth Games and Activities
- Build backend systems for interactive educational games, challenges, simulations, and activities.
- Support game logic, scoring, progress, achievements, saved work, and personalized recommendations.
- Help create safe, age-appropriate digital experiences for young people.
- Support reusable systems that allow new games and activities to be developed efficiently.
Partner and Administrative Platforms
- Develop dashboards for schools, sports organizations, sponsors, and community partners.
- Support customized branding, program access, participation reporting, and impact measurement.
- Improve internal tools for managing content, users, programs, digital assets, and partner accounts.
- Build reporting systems that help Science of Sport understand engagement, learning progress, and program outcomes.
Primary Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain backend functionality using PHP and Laravel.
- Build, document, test, and maintain REST APIs.
- Contribute across multiple Science of Sport websites, applications, and digital products.
- Design and modify MySQL tables, relationships, migrations, indexes, and data structures.
- Integrate third-party services, data feeds, payment systems, cloud storage, communication tools, and other APIs.
- Implement queues, scheduled tasks, webhooks, notifications, and background jobs.
- Support authentication, authorization, user roles, subscriptions, enrollments, and organizational accounts.
- Troubleshoot application errors, failed jobs, API problems, integration failures, and production defects.
- Improve application performance, reliability, security, scalability, and maintainability.
- Write automated tests for new functionality and critical workflows.
- Participate in pull-request reviews and follow established Git and release processes.
- Maintain clear technical documentation for features, integrations, deployments, and significant decisions.
- Communicate progress, blockers, risks, dependencies, and scope concerns early.
- Support production releases and post-release verification in coordination with the technical lead.
- Contribute technical ideas that help Science of Sport create stronger digital experiences for students, educators, families, and partners.
Required Technical ExperiencePHP and Laravel
- At least three years of professional PHP and Laravel development experience.
- Strong working knowledge of PHP 8.1+ and Laravel 10 or later.
- Experience with Laravel routing, controllers, middleware, validation, Form Requests, service classes, and dependency injection.
- Strong knowledge of Eloquent ORM, model relationships, authentication, authorization, and Laravel Sanctum.
- Experience with Laravel queues, jobs, events, notifications, scheduling, webhooks, and file storage.
- Ability to organize business logic into maintainable services and application components rather than placing it entirely inside controllers.
APIs and Third-Party Integrations
- Experience designing, building, documenting, and consuming REST APIs.
- Experience working with JSON, API authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, and error handling.
- Experience integrating third-party services and processing webhook events.
- Ability to investigate inconsistent, delayed, or incomplete data received from external systems.
- Familiarity with asynchronous processing, idempotency, and resilient integration patterns.
MySQL and Data Architecture
- Strong experience with MySQL, SQL, relational database design, Laravel migrations, and seeders.
- Ability to design tables, relationships, and indexes that support application requirements.
- Ability to diagnose inefficient queries and database-performance issues.
- Understanding of data integrity, database transactions, constraints, backups, and safe production changes.
Git and Development Workflow
- Strong working knowledge of Git and GitLab or a comparable source-control platform.
- Experience with feature branches, pull requests, code reviews, merge conflicts, rebasing, release branches, and hotfixes.
- Ability to create focused, meaningful commits and follow an established development workflow.
Testing, Security, and Reliability
- Experience writing automated tests using PHPUnit, Pest, or comparable tools.
- Understanding of application and API security, including authentication, authorization, validation, credential management, and protection of sensitive information.
- Familiarity with privacy and security considerations for applications used by young people and educational organizations.
- Experience implementing logging, exception handling, monitoring, and production diagnostics.
- Ability to create safeguards for failed integrations, duplicate events, missing information, and interrupted background processes.
AWS and Deployment
Working knowledge of AWS-hosted applications, preferably including:
- EC2
- RDS
- S3
- SQS or other queue services
- CloudWatch or comparable monitoring tools
- Environment configuration and secure secret management
The developer should be able to support deployments and diagnose infrastructure-related application issues. Ownership of major infrastructure and architectural decisions will remain with the technical lead.Frontend FundamentalsAlthough this is primarily a backend position, the developer should understand:
- HTML and CSS
- JavaScript
- JSON
- Fetch/AJAX
- REST API consumption
- Responsive web applications
- Basic browser debugging
- How APIs and backend systems support the intended UX/UI experience
Expected Level of IndependenceAfter the objectives, requirements, acceptance criteria, and technical direction are established, the developer should be able to:
- Review the relevant code and existing architecture.
- Understand how the requirement fits within the larger digital product.
- Identify affected systems, integrations, database changes, and dependencies.
- Propose an appropriate implementation approach.
- Raise questions, risks, or scope concerns before beginning significant development.
- Divide the work into manageable and testable tasks.
- Implement and test the feature.
- Submit work through the established pull-request process.
- Respond constructively to code-review feedback.
- Document the completed feature and support its release.
The developer is not expected to make major product, architecture, security, or infrastructure decisions independently. These decisions will be reviewed with the technical lead and applicable team members.
Delivery and Operational Practices
The ideal candidate has experience working in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or another iterative delivery environment and is comfortable:
- Delivering work in small, testable increments.
- Participating in planning, refinement, reviews, demonstrations, and continuous-improvement conversations.
- Working within a Kanban-based workflow.
- Using Asana, Jira, Trello, or a comparable project-management platform.
- Keeping task status, documentation, blockers, estimates, and supporting evidence current.
- Working within an established source of truth for requirements and project documentation.
- Providing clear demonstrations, release notes, or completion evidence for finished work.
Communication and CollaborationThe successful candidate will demonstrate:
- Professional fluency in written and spoken English.
- Proactive and dependable communication in a remote working environment.
- The ability to communicate risks, blockers, dependencies, delays, and scope changes early.
- Strong ownership while remaining aligned with team priorities and technical direction.
- Openness to feedback and the ability to consider alternative technical approaches.
- Experience collaborating with product, UX/UI, curriculum, operations, marketing, and QA teams.
- The ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to non-technical colleagues.
- Dependable availability during agreed-upon working and meeting hours.
- An appreciation for the different needs of students, educators, families, partners, and internal administrators.
Product and Problem-Solving Mindset
We are looking for someone who can understand the problem behind a requirement rather than only completing a technical ticket.The developer should be able to:
- Understand who will use the feature and what they need to accomplish.
- Identify relevant technical constraints, dependencies, and risks.
- Recommend practical solutions within the agreed scope.
- Raise constructive concerns when a requirement may create reliability, security, usability, or maintenance issues.
- Balance technical quality with implementation effort and delivery priorities.
- Adapt implementation as requirements evolve through testing, feedback, and product discovery.
- Consider whether a solution can be reused across multiple programs, partners, sports, or digital products.
- Help create systems that can grow as Science of Sport’s digital services expand.
Preferred QualificationsThe following experience is valuable but not required:
- EdTech, educational platforms, learning-management systems, or youth-focused digital products.
- Interactive games, gamification, achievements, challenges, or progress systems.
- Content-management systems and public-facing websites.
- Multi-tenant or partner-branded applications.
- Sports-data feeds, statistics platforms, or live-event integrations.
- Stripe subscriptions, donations, billing systems, or webhook processing.
- AI-assisted content generation, structured prompt workflows, or model API integrations.
- Analytics, reporting, data validation, or impact-measurement systems.
- Experience supporting applications used by schools, nonprofits, or youth-serving organizations.
- Familiarity with accessibility and responsive design principles.
- Interest in STEM education and sports.
What Success Looks Like
During the first 90 days, the developer should be able to:
- Understand Science of Sport’s primary digital products, application architecture, and development workflow.
- Develop a working understanding of the website, learning platform, STEM Replay, and related administrative systems.
- Complete assigned Laravel features and production fixes with decreasing levels of support.
- Submit well-structured, tested, and documented pull requests.
- Communicate consistently and surface blockers before they affect delivery.
- Successfully contribute to at least one meaningful digital product feature, integration, or platform improvement.
- Demonstrate an ability to work across different applications while following shared technical standards.
- Contribute to improved platform reliability, maintainability, or development speed.
Pay: $35.00 - $45.00 per hour
Work Location: In person
