Nexcess

Staff WordPress Engineer

Nexcess
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1 month ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+

Base Salary

$120k - $155k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Set technical direction and define target architectures and migration paths for a platform area.
  • Own outcomes across team boundaries and lead consolidation, migration, and phased rollout work with backward compatibility and rollback plans.
  • Make trade-off decisions involving build versus buy, performance, complexity, cost, reliability, and operational burden.
  • Automate provisioning, configuration, maintenance, deployments, migrations, and diagnostics.
  • Design systems, interfaces, and architecture that other teams build against.
  • Identify ambiguous or systemic problems and turn them into executable work for multiple teams.
  • Serve as an escalation point for difficult technical issues and incidents.
  • Partner with Engineering Managers and Product on roadmap, sequencing, and feasibility.
  • Raise engineering standards through reviews, architecture discussions, examples, and deliberate mentorship.
  • Write design documents, RFCs, and post-incident write-ups as primary engineering artifacts.

Requirements

  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep professional PHP experience.
  • Mastery of modern PHP 8.x, object-oriented design, dependency injection, Composer, autoloading, PSR standards, and static analysis.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple teams, including setting direction adopted by other teams.
  • Deep WordPress expertise, including hooks and filters, the REST API, WP-CLI, plugin architecture, and upgrade-safe development.
  • Strong Linux knowledge covering process and service management, systemd, filesystems, permissions, networking, and systems under load.
  • Working shell scripting experience, especially Bash automation for deployments, migrations, and diagnostics.
  • Deep familiarity with nginx or Apache, PHP-FPM, MySQL or MariaDB query performance, and Redis or Memcached object caching.
  • Experience leading a migration, consolidation, or platform rewrite with backward compatibility, phased rollout, and a credible rollback plan.
  • Ability to reason about cost, reliability, operational burden, and technical correctness.
  • Experience with automated testing using PHPUnit, Codeception, wp-browser, or equivalent.
  • Excellent written communication and demonstrated ability to communicate technical disagreements constructively.
  • A degree in Computer Science or a related field is welcome, with equivalent practical experience also welcomed.
  • Preferred experience includes React, Block Editor and block development, the @wordpress/* package ecosystem, WooCommerce at scale, Magento or Adobe Commerce, Ansible or Puppet/Chef/Salt, New Relic, Xdebug, Query Monitor, Terraform, containers, CI/CD pipeline ownership, multi-tenant architecture, capacity planning, WCAG 2.1 AA, WAI-ARIA, and contributions to WordPress core or open source.

Benefits

  • Permanently remote, full-time position with a globally distributed team.
  • Remote-first, async-by-default working environment with written decisions and limited meetings.
  • Applicants may work wherever the company can legally engage them.
  • Requires at least four hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time, approximately 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM ET.

Tech Stack

AnsibleBashChefLinuxMariaDBMySQLPHPPuppetReactRedisTerraformWordPress

Categories

Nexcess

About Nexcess

201-500 employees
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