Senior WordPress Developer

Description

There are a number of Senior Software Engineer positions available – all across the two aspects of our business: Perchance’s managed WordPress/Magento 2.2+ etc host and WordPress products running on that host. We will determine the best fit with you during the interview process, and will not require you to make a choice at the outset.

Platform Cloud expands on the host platform, by handling provisioning & management lifecycle, the PHP request path, caching layers, database performance, infrastructure reliability of customer sites at scale. A complex product portfolio, including the core APIs, the Block Editor, and writing upgrade-safe WordPress code shipped to an enormous and totally unmanageable installed base come hand-in-hand with us in Products and Solutions.

They both proceed to find the same person: someone who can be at ease on both sides of the wp-config! You program the PHP and know the server that runs it. If a page is slow, you don’t go there to the plugin is slow – you will know you are getting a slow page, regardless of whether it is a slow query plan, a cold object cache, a saturated PHP-FPM worker pool, or you’re running genuinely slow code. This is a differentiator from most WordPress roles because that’s an operational sense.

This is a full-time, Remote (WFH) position that can be permanent. We seek your services around the world, where legally possible. The only hard scheduling rule is for the event to have a minimum of four hours of overlap with the US Eastern conference, rough estimate being between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST, to allow for pairing, review and response with the other partners.

Responsibilities

• Be responsible for and overlook significant features and systems from end-to-end — design, build, trial, deploy, and post-deploy
• Create and deploy designs on the platform and product surfaces users interact with on a daily basis
• Analyze test and resolve issues end-to-end, from slow query, through cache, to what the visitor waits for.
• Write PHP that will last when you are attacked by the real world: dissing plugins, old data, and the users of your site who do things you didn’t expect.
• Support system integration and upgrade; tie up platforms together by one architecture, while not harming existing sites depending on the platforms
• Be in-tuned to design in our architecture, and know when to assert oneself against it
• Decompose fuzzy problems into problems that can be shipped incrementally
• Write and maintain automated tests to include them in the feature and not just as an after-thought
• Support code review activities as firstclass activities and critique constructively the codebase and the developer — don’t hesitate to mention that it has made the codebase better and that the developer is better.
• Enhance the tools, scripts and pipelines providing the entire company with the ability to ship with confidence, while automating the operational activities traditionally performed manually.
• Mentor 1 or 2 engineers (formal or informal)
• Write things down – even in a distributed/remote team spread over many time zones, a decision that’s not recorded didn’t occur
• Food Preparation Skills and Food Preparation Competencies and Qualifications
  Building and maintenance of PHP production applications for the last 5+ years, not just customising but also using: Object-oriented design; Dependency injection, including using Composer and autoloading; PSR standards; PHP static analysis; PHP 8.x (modern PHP version)
• To work with a large installed base and be familiar with how to write upgrade safe code with hooks and filters and REST API and WP-CLI and the WordPress plugin and theme architecture.
• Real comfort in Linux (not just as a code-hosting platform): process & service managment, systemd, filesystems & permissions, networking basics, reading a loaded system:
• Working shell scripting. You use bash as a script language to simplify real-life tasks such as deployments, migrations, maintenance, diagnostics, etc., and you can read people’s codes without batting an eyelid.
• Experiential with the hosting stack: nginx or Apache, PHP-FPM worker pools and their tuning, MySQL or MariaDB query performance, object caching using Redis or Memcached. You can profile a slow request and specify which layer it is the slow one
• Experience with automated testing with PHPUnit, Codeception and a browser like wp-browser test or other techniques that you can defend
• Knows and has experience with Git, code review and CI/CD as routine procedure
• Excellent written communication skills, and the capacity to work independently at cross-currents, with minimal supervision.
• It is preferred to have a degree in Computer Science or related subject, but it is desired if they can have a few years of equivalent hands-on experience.
• The following is considered to be preferred qualifications/experience:
• React is used for admin interfaces, Block Editor UI, and control-panel surfaces.
• Block Editor and block development, The @wordpress/* package ecosystem etc.
• Use WooCommerce to scale up to large catalogs, high order volumes and checkout speed.
• Building it, operating it or hosting it at scale – Magento or Adobe Commerce
  Setting up the configuration management and server automation with Ansible or similar technologies like Puppet, Chef or Salt.
• Utilizing observability or profiling (New Relic, Xdebug, Query Monitor etc.).
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform / other, Containers, and Ownership of CI/CD Pipeline vs just using it).
• Accessible architectural development – AA compliant with WCAG 2.1 AND WAI-ARIA
  Small and dedicated contributions to WordPress core or to the broader open source community

Why Join Us?

This will be an opportunity to collaborate with the Infrastructure team and the Software team at the same organization but is rare. Wherever you can do one or the other. It’s here that your decision on a product’s query patterns is made on infrastructure that your colleagues operate and here that our decisions on the platform are made by people who write WordPress code for a living.

We’re remote-first, and really distributed – our team is currently spread from the United States, Canada, to Spain, Brazil, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Türkiye, and the Dominican Republic. It focuses the way we work – async here by default, decisions documented, meetings used for real incurring conversation. Small teams, true ownership, and instead of heroics a sustainable pace.