Staff WordPress Engineer

Nexcess

7d • $120,000 - $155,000 • Remote

About The Position

Nexcess is consolidating a significant amount of infrastructure and software under one architecture. This role involves leading technical direction for an entire platform area or several teams, with a focus on both code and strategic technical decisions. The work is challenging, involving multiple hosting platforms and a portfolio of WordPress products used on millions of sites, requiring engineers who can manage the overall picture, define the target architecture, and guide multiple teams through the process. The position requires an understanding of both application-level code (PHP) and the underlying server infrastructure, including performance optimization across various layers like database, caching, and server configuration. This is a permanently remote, full-time position with a global hiring scope, requiring at least four hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time for collaboration and support.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering with deep PHP throughout, including mastery of modern PHP 8.x: object-oriented design, dependency injection, Composer and autoloading, PSR standards, and static analysis
• Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple teams. You have set direction that other teams followed, and you can talk about a time it went wrong
• Deep WordPress expertise: hooks and filters, the REST API, WP-CLI, plugin architecture, and hard-won understanding of what it takes to ship upgrade-safe code to a very large uncontrolled installed base
• Genuine comfort with servers and hosting. You are at home on Linux, you can read logs and profile a slow request, and you can reason about nginx, PHP-FPM worker pools, MySQL query performance, and object caching with Redis or Memcached in the request path — and architect for those constraints rather than discovering them in production
• A migration, consolidation, or platform rewrite you led, with backward compatibility, a phased rollout, and a rollback plan you either needed or could genuinely have used
• The ability to reason about cost, reliability, and operational burden, not only correctness. A design that is right and unaffordable is not right
• Experience with automated testing using PHPUnit, Codeception and wp-browser, or equivalent, and a point of view on what is worth testing
• Excellent written communication. You can disagree with a director in writing and be right about it, and also be wrong about it and move on without drama
• A degree in Computer Science or a related field is welcome; equivalent practical experience is equally welcome

Nice To Haves

• React, for admin interfaces, Block Editor UI, and control-panel surfaces
• Block Editor and block development, and the @wordpress/ package ecosystem
• WooCommerce at scale: large catalogs, high order volume, checkout performance
• Observability and profiling with New Relic, Xdebug, Query Monitor, or comparable APM tooling
• Infrastructure as code, containers, and owning a CI/CD pipeline rather than only using one
• Multi-tenant architecture and capacity planning
• Accessible site building to WCAG 2.1 AA and WAI-ARIA
• Contributions to WordPress core or the wider open-source ecosystem

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for a platform area: define the target architecture and the path to it
• Own outcomes across team boundaries; your scope is a domain, not a backlog
• Lead consolidation and migration work across systems that already have customers on them, with backward compatibility and a rollback story that actually holds
• Make the trade-off calls: build versus buy, performance versus complexity, what we fix now versus what we live with and why
• Design systems rather than only implementing within them — define the interfaces and architecture that other teams build against
• Find and frame the problems nobody has articulated yet: the recurring incident, the abstraction costing every team a week a quarter, the thing everyone works around
• Reduce ambiguity for other people by turning a vague, important problem into work several teams can execute in parallel
• Act as an escalation point when something is genuinely hard or genuinely on fire
• Partner with Engineering Managers and Product on roadmap, sequencing, and what is actually feasible
• Raise the engineering bar across teams through review, architecture discussion, and example
• Mentor deliberately: grow the Senior engineers around you and make yourself less load-bearing over time
• Write. Design documents, RFCs, and post-incident write-ups are primary artifacts at this level, not overhead

Benefits

• Very few engineers get to make architectural calls with both the infrastructure and the software in view. Here, product decisions land on infrastructure your colleagues operate, and platform decisions constrain what the products can do. Both sides are in the building, and at this level you get a real say in how they fit together.
• We are remote-first and genuinely distributed — the team currently spans the United States, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Türkiye, and the Dominican Republic.
• That shapes how we work: async by default, decisions written down, meetings reserved for the things that actually need a conversation.
• It is also why writing matters so much in this role.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed