Senior WordPress Developer

Job description

About Nexcess Nexcess delivers specialized cloud infrastructure designed for environments where peak performance and rigorous compliance are non-negotiable. Supporting a global client base ranging from high-growth agencies to mission-critical enterprise operations, we have established a legacy rooted in technical proficiency and collaborative client success. Our managed environments are backed by a dedicated team of experts committed to operational excellence and reliable execution when it counts most. We also build the software that runs on top of that infrastructure — The Events Calendar, LearnDash, Kadence, and SolidWP among them — installed on millions of WordPress sites worldwide. Compensation: The base salary for this role is between $80,000-$120,000 and varies based on location, experience, and skill set. Description We are hiring several Senior Software Engineers to work across the two halves of what we do: the managed WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento hosting platform itself, and the WordPress products that run on it. We will work out the best fit with you during the interview process rather than asking you to choose up front. Platform Cloud covers the hosting platform: provisioning and lifecycle, the PHP request path, caching layers, database performance, and the reliability of customer sites at scale. Products and Solutions covers our WordPress product portfolio: core APIs, the Block Editor, and writing upgrade-safe code that ships to an enormous and completely uncontrolled installed base. What both tracks have in common is the person we are looking for: someone comfortable on both sides of the wp-config . You write the PHP, and you understand the server executing it. When a page is slow, you do not stop at "the plugin is slow" — you know whether it is a query plan, a cold object cache, a saturated PHP-FPM worker pool, or genuinely your code. That operational instinct is what separates this role from a typical WordPress job. This is a permanently remote full-time position. We hire globally, wherever we can legally engage you. The one hard scheduling requirement is at least four hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time, roughly 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM ET, so you can pair, review, and respond alongside the rest of the team. Responsibilities Own substantial features and systems end to end — design, implementation, testing, rollout, and what happens after rollout Build and ship across the platform and product surfaces that customers touch every day Diagnose and fix performance problems end to end, from a slow query, through the cache layer, to the response a visitor actually waits for Write PHP that survives contact with the real world: hostile plugins, ancient data, and site owners who will do things you did not anticipate Contribute to the consolidation and modernization of systems as we bring platforms together under one architecture, without breaking the sites already depending on them Design within our architecture, and know when to push back on it Break down ambiguous problems into work that can actually be shipped incrementally Write and maintain automated tests, treating them as part of the feature rather than an afterthought Participate in code review as a first-class activity — give feedback that makes the codebase better and the author stronger Improve the tooling, scripts, and pipelines that let the whole team ship with confidence, and automate the operational work that would otherwise be done by hand Mentor one or two engineers, formally or informally Write things down; in a distributed team spread across many timezones, a decision that is not written down did not happen Skills, Competencies, and Qualifications 5+ years of professional PHP, building and maintaining production software rather than only customizing it, including modern PHP 8.x: object-oriented design, dependency injection, Composer and autoloading, PSR standards, and static analysis 3+ years of deep WordPress experience: hooks and filters, the REST API, WP-CLI, plugin and theme architecture, and a real understanding of how to write upgrade-safe code for a large installed base Genuine comfort on Linux as an operating system, not just as the place your code happens to run: process and service management, systemd, filesystems and permissions, networking fundamentals, and reading a system that is under load Working shell scripting. You write bash to automate real work — deployments, migrations, maintenance, diagnostics — and you can read somebody else's script without flinching Hands-on with the hosting stack: nginx or Apache, PHP-FPM worker pools and tuning, MySQL or MariaDB query performance, and object caching with Redis or Memcached. You can profile a slow request and say which layer is actually responsible Experience with automated testing using PHPUnit, Codeception and wp-browser, or an equivalent you can defend Comfortable with Git, code review, and CI/CD as daily practice Strong written communication and the ability to work autonomously across timezones with minimal supervision A degree in Computer Science or a related field is welcome; equivalent practical experience is equally welcome Preferred Qualifications and Experience 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 Magento or Adobe Commerce — building on it, operating it, or hosting it at scale Configuration management and server automation with Ansible, or a comparable tool such as Puppet, Chef, or Salt Observability and profiling with New Relic, Xdebug, Query Monitor, or comparable APM tooling Infrastructure as code with Terraform or similar, containers, and owning a CI/CD pipeline rather than only using one Accessible site building to WCAG 2.1 AA and WAI-ARIA Contributions to WordPress core or the wider open-source ecosystem Why Join Us? This is a rare chance to work on both the infrastructure and the software at the same company. Most places do one or the other. Here, the decisions you make about a product's query patterns land on infrastructure your colleagues operate, and the decisions we make about the platform are informed by people who write WordPress code for a living. We are remote-first and genuinely distributed — the team currently spans the United States, Canada, Spain, Brazil, 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. Small teams, real ownership, and a sustainable pace rather than heroics. #LI-REMOTE About Nexcess Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters.