Senior Engineer - WordPress

Role Overview

ETV runs a WordPress CMS as a live publishing platform, and this is a platform-ownership role rather than a site-build one. You inherit a working system with real history behind it and make it better while it keeps publishing - themes, plugins, performance, security, and production support. The single most important quality is the instinct to improve what exists incrementally rather than argue for a rewrite. Experience required: 3-10 years.

What You'll Work On

• WordPress CMS development and maintenance
• Custom theme development, and custom plugin development, management, and customisation
• PHP-based UI development for editorial and admin surfaces
• API integrations
• Performance optimisation, security, and production support

Who Is Right for This Role

• 3-10 years in PHP 7.x/8.x and WordPress CMS development
• Has owned and maintained a production WordPress platform for 2+ years
• Has operated a WordPress application supporting 100+ concurrent users
• Has actively owned WordPress best practices and plugin and theme management as a standing responsibility
• Comfortable inside legacy code and technical debt - improves it in place, in safe steps, without taking publishing down
• Strong on debugging and performance optimisation, and on security best practices for WordPress

Who Isn't a Fit

• Has little or no experience working with legacy code, technical debt, or incremental refactoring
• Has a pattern of requiring a clean rewrite rather than being able to incrementally improve an existing system

How You'll Work

• Willing to spend up to 10 days in the office during onboarding to get to know the team and engineering ecosystem.
• Actively participates in daily standups and weekly connects.
• Actively participates in technical discussions.
• Communicates clearly and proactively.
• Uses asynchronous communication effectively, providing enough context to make decisions offline.
• Available and responsive for important calls and team discussions during regular office hours and occasionally outside of them.