3 months 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.
About Nexcess
Nexcess provides managed hosting and specialty cloud services for SMBs, agencies, developers, and ecommerce teams running WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento. Its subscription offerings include optimized cloud and dedicated environments with managed compliance and support for complex configurations. The privately held company is headquartered in Lansing, Michigan and serves customers worldwide.