Lead Software Engineer – Digital Platforms

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Virginia.

📋 Description

• Provide technical leadership for a vast web ecosystem consisting of approximately 140 WordPress sites and Drupal properties.

• Own the architecture, hosting, and infrastructure strategy, as well as integrations and long-term platform direction.

• Collaborate with engineers to build, review, and debug code.

• Manage deployment and release processes, including CI/CD and automation.

• Oversee plugins, dependencies, security, patching, and remediation across the entire portfolio.

• Establish engineering and QA standards in conjunction with the SDET team.

• Lead technical discovery and estimation, effectively communicating estimates, dependencies, risks, and technical context to the Product team.

• Engage in Product discovery and manage stakeholder expectations.

• Enhance the triage, allocation, and sequencing of engineering tasks.

• Mentor and develop engineers, minimizing key-person dependencies through comprehensive documentation, knowledge sharing, and coverage.

• Formulate a 12–24 month strategy for consolidating or migrating WordPress and Drupal sites.

• Expand technical leadership across additional workstreams and technology stacks.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of eight years of professional software engineering experience, with time spent as a technical lead, staff engineer, or engineering lead for a team or portfolio.

• Proven ability to remain highly hands-on while in a leadership role.

• Strong skills in architecture and systems thinking within an ecosystem of applications.

• Sound technical judgment and the capability to clarify technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

• Demonstrated experience in mentoring and developing engineers, including senior individual contributors.

• Supervisory experience that includes directly managing engineers, setting performance expectations, and conducting performance reviews.

• Reliable at estimating and identifying risks, dependencies, and sequencing needs early on.

• Comfort in participating in product discovery and respectfully challenging requests.

• Extensive current WordPress expertise: custom themes and plugins, Gutenberg, Advanced Custom Fields, WP-CLI, and experience with multisite or large multi-site portfolios.

• Extensive current Drupal expertise: custom modules and themes, Drupal 10+, entity and configuration management systems, Views, Drush, Composer-based site builds, and headless or decoupled Drupal using JSON:API or GraphQL with a JavaScript front end.

• Strong knowledge of modern PHP, including object-oriented design and Composer.

• SQL experience, particularly in query performance optimization.

• Proficient in front-end JavaScript, including Next.js, React, and modern build tooling.

• Experience in managing hosting, deployment pipelines, and environment configuration for production web platforms.

• Strong CI/CD and DevOps capabilities, including automated build, test, and deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code, containerization, environment and secrets management, and monitoring, logging, and alerting.

• Familiarity with SSL certificates, DNS, and web protocols.

• Proven track record of utilizing AI-enabled tools and practices to enhance productivity.

• Enthusiasm for contributing to Stand Together's vision and principled approach, along with a commitment to its culture.

• Experience with Upsun, AWS, and Cloudflare or similar CDN is preferred.

• Experience in consolidating, migrating, or reducing a site portfolio is preferred.

• Knowledge of accessibility standards, particularly WCAG 2.2 AA, is preferred.

• Experience collaborating with marketing and campaign teams under tight deadlines is preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• 6% 401(k) match with immediate vesting.

• Flexible time off.

• Comprehensive health and dental insurance plans.

• Wellness and mental health support through Peloton and Talkspace.

• A meaningful career within a community of over 1,400 employees.

• A non-hierarchical environment that empowers employees to explore, develop, and utilize their unique talents.