Senior Frontend Engineer with PHP Experience (UK or DE)

TravelLocal; Bristol; Remote; Confidential; Full time

Job summary

TravelLocal is looking for a Senior Frontend Engineer with Full-Stack experience to enhance user interactions for local tour operators. Join a mission-driven company committed to local expertise and sustainable travel. This fully remote opportunity allows collaboration with a vibrant team, catering to your professional growth.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

26 vacation days per year

Generous professional development allowance

Team events and off-sites

Work from modern offices in Berlin and Bristol

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software development experience with 5+ years in frontend development.
• Strong skills in semantic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Working knowledge of PHP, especially with Symfony.

Responsibilities

• Improve user experience for local tour operators.
• Own frontend development within a PHP/Symfony stack.
• Shape design-to-engineering workflows for quality improvements.

Skills

Frontend development

Responsive design

User-centered mindset

Collaboration

Curiosity

Tools

PHP

Symfony

Bootstrap 5

Figma

JavaScript

Job description

Hours: Full-time

Salary: £65K - £75K / €77K - €88K

Location: Remote (within the UK or Germany only)

Contract: Permanent

About TravelLocal

TravelLocal is transforming the way people explore the world. We connect travellers with tailor-made adventures crafted by handpicked, locally-owned tour operators in nearly 100 destinations. By championing the “buy local” movement, we’re making travel fairer, more sustainable, and deeply rewarding—for travellers, local communities, and the planet.

Since our journey began, we’ve helped over 50,000 customers from 90 countries experience the magic of local expertise, crafting unforgettable trips and reshaping the travel industry along the way.

Join our vibrant, remote-friendly team with a footprint in Bristol and Berlin. We’re a group of innovators, travellers, and changemakers dedicated to building a better world through travel. If this mission resonates with you, let’s talk.

Tasks

Who you are and what you’ll do

As a Senior Frontend Engineer with Full-Stack experience, you’ll play a key role in improving the user experience for our local tour operators—our supply-side partners in a two-sided marketplace. While your primary focus will be on frontend development, your ability to contribute to backend work is a strong plus. You’ll collaborate closely with Design, Product, and Engineering to build high-quality, maintainable, and user-friendly interfaces that help our partners manage bookings, payments, and communications, enabling them to efficiently deliver tailor-made travel experiences at scale. You’ll be part of a small product team with a culture built on autonomy, shared ownership, flexibility, and open communication.

Here’s how you’ll have an impact:

• Help unlock a more modern and performant platform that empowers our local partners to work more efficiently and with less friction.
• Own the frontend development within a PHP/Symfony-based stack.
• Build and refine foundational frontend structures to enable scalable interface development.
• Shape the design-to-engineering workflow in collaboration with Product Designer to improve delivery speed and quality.
• Work closely with Product Design, Product Management, and Backend Engineers to deliver cohesive, product-facing features.
• Maintain code quality with thorough code reviews, automated tests, and best practice implementation.
• Document thoughtfully to support knowledge sharing and team alignment.

How our tech environment looks like:

You’ll be instrumental in helping us modernise an essential part of our platform, elevating it from a legacy tech to a more modular, consistent, and performant frontend experience.

Current state:

• Frontend built with Twig (Symfony’s templating system), jQuery, plain JavaScript, and ad hoc CSS (partially Bootstrap, partially SASS).
• Backend powered by Symfony (PHP), running on AWS.
• Robust CI/CD pipelines integrated with AWS.

Where we’re heading:

• Responsive, accessible components based on modern web standards.
• Modern workflow using Figma prototypes and a component library for consistency and reusability.
• Consistent, snap-together CSS/component framework.
• Lightweight JavaScript, using libraries where useful.
• Tech stack with shallow learning curve.

Requirements

What you’ll bring

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, with at least 5 years focused on frontend development.
• Strong hands-on frontend skills, including semantic HTML, modern CSS, and plain JavaScript—comfortable building responsive, user-friendly UIs.
• Working knowledge of PHP (preferably with Twig templates and a PHP framework like Symfony or Laravel)—able to understand and open to contributing to backend and APIs.
• Familiarity with or openness to Bootstrap 5 and/or other CSS frameworks.
• Exposure to tools like Figma (especially Dev Mode) and Storybook, or a strong interest in learning them.
• A user-centred mindset—you’re excited to partner with Product and Design to shape great user experiences, not just implement them.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with a history of partnering closely with product, design, and engineering peers.
• Curiosity and a growth mindset—willing to stretch beyond your current skillset, explore new tools, and contribute where needed.Experience with or openness to using AI tools as part of the modern development workflow.
• Experience with or openness to using AI tools as part of the modern development workflow.

Benefits

What we offer

Empowered culture:

• A collaborative environment built on trust and ownership.
• Opportunities to actively shape product outcomes through the Product Operating Model.

Flexibility:

• Work fully remotely from within the UK or Germany.
• Temporarily work remotely within Europe after your probation period.
• Option to use modern offices in Berlin and Bristol.

Learning and growth:

• A generous annual allowance for professional development, wellbeing, and travel with our partners.
• Mentorship opportunities and a culture of continuous improvement.

Work-Life balance:

• Flexible working hours.
• 26 vacation days per year, increasing with tenure, plus public holidays.

Team events:

• Two all-company off-sites per year, with travel and accommodation included.

Interview process

• Application and CV review
• Screening interview
• Cross-functional collaboration interview
• Take-home technical exercise
• Technical deep dive interview
• Culture fit interview
• Offer!

How to apply

If you’re excited about the opportunity to build meaningful experiences for our local tour operators, we’d love to hear from you. Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, we encourage you to apply. Your unique perspective and career path might be exactly what we’re looking for.

Please include your CV and a link to your LinkedIn profile.

Feel free to include a short note about why you're interested in the role and how your experience aligns with what we’re looking for.

We aim to respond to all applications within two weeks.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.