Staff WordPress Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Establish the technical direction for a platform area by outlining the target architecture and the strategy to achieve it.

• Take ownership of outcomes across team boundaries for a specific domain instead of merely managing a backlog.

• Lead the efforts for consolidation and migration across customer-facing systems, ensuring backward compatibility and rollback strategies are in place.

• Evaluate build-versus-buy options, performance versus complexity, and make prioritization decisions.

• Automate tasks related to provisioning, configuration, and maintenance operations.

• Design system interfaces and architecture for other teams to utilize in their development.

• Identify and articulate unexpressed technical and operational challenges.

• Minimize ambiguity by transforming significant problems into actionable tasks for multiple teams.

• Serve as an escalation point for complex or urgent issues.

• Collaborate with Engineering Managers and Product teams on the roadmap, sequencing, and feasibility assessments.

• Enhance engineering standards through reviews, architectural discussions, and by setting a good example.

• Mentor Senior engineers, gradually decreasing personal dependencies over time.

• Compose design documents, RFCs, and post-incident reports.

• Work across managed WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento hosting infrastructure, or within the WordPress product portfolio.

• Troubleshoot performance issues related to query plans, object caching, PHP-FPM worker pools, and application code.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of professional software engineering experience.

• Extensive experience with PHP, particularly with modern PHP 8.x.

• Proficiency in object-oriented design, dependency injection, Composer, autoloading, PSR standards, and static analysis.

• Proven technical leadership across multiple teams.

• In-depth WordPress knowledge, including hooks and filters, REST API, WP-CLI, plugin architecture, and upgrade-safe code practices.

• Strong understanding of the Linux operating system, including process and service management, systemd, filesystems, permissions, networking, and system load analysis.

• Experience in shell scripting and automation, with the ability to write Bash scripts for deployments, migrations, and diagnostics.

• Familiarity with nginx or Apache, PHP-FPM optimization, MySQL or MariaDB query performance, and Redis or Memcached for object caching.

• Experience leading migration, consolidation, or platform rewrites with backward compatibility, phased rollouts, and rollback planning.

• Ability to assess cost, reliability, and operational burdens.

• Experience with automated testing using PHPUnit, Codeception, wp-browser, or similar tools.

• Exceptional written communication skills.

• A degree in Computer Science or a related field is desirable; equivalent practical experience is also acceptable.

• Preferred: Knowledge of React, Block Editor and @wordpress/* ecosystem, WooCommerce at scale, Magento or Adobe Commerce, Ansible or similar configuration management tools, observability/APM tools, Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code tools, containers, CI/CD, multi-tenant architecture, capacity planning, WCAG 2.1 AA, WAI-ARIA, and contributions to open-source projects.

• Ability to maintain at least four hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time, approximately from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM ET.

• Must be legally employable in the hiring location.

🏝️ Benefits

• Fully remote position.

• Global hiring wherever legally permissible.

• Remote-first, authentically distributed work environment.

• Asynchronous communication by default.

• Documentation of decisions; meetings are reserved for discussions that require them.

• Minimum of four hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time.

• Equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities.