Lead Developer (WordPress)

We’re an evidence-driven creative company.

We’re steered by hard evidence and driven by a love of creative work.

We help brands big and small, make confident creative choices that get results. Evidence gives our clients confidence. So we keep our ear to the ground, our eye on the future as well as diving head-first into the data where all the untapped and hidden insights are.

We are seeking a dynamic and results-oriented Lead Developer to join our Digital Team and play a pivotal role in steering our development output. As a Lead Developer, you will be responsible for pushing technical boundaries, leading our back-end developers and ultimately delivering exceptional work for our clients.

Roles & responsibilities

• Deliver exceptional work for our clients. Own task delivery and solution design for complex engineering problems, consistently questioning choices to actively contribute to continuous delivery and improvement.

• Take overall responsibility for scoping and estimating technical, deliverables, consulting the Technical Director where required for their expertise.

• Lead the technical requirement gathering, planning and implementation of deliverables.

• Proactively recommend technologies and ideas that advance the solutions in place for your accounts and the processes used for executing them.

• Ensure high quality output from the developers on your accounts, providing support and feedback to developers within your team.

• Carry responsibility for technical project documentation following established templates and sharing documentation to developers and others to ensure that they understand and can contribute to it as necessary.

• Line manage direct reports, overseeing their objectives, training and performance. Escalate to the Technical Director and Head of Digital Delivery when necessary.

Knowledge & skills

• Experience within AWS working across the following services: EC2, RDS, S3 & Cloudfront. Experience with ElastiCache (Redis) & OpenSearch are nice to haves.

• Working knowledge of Ubuntu OS in relation to LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) stack web server configuration, updates/upgrades and optimisations.

• Demonstrable experience with build tools and deployment pipelines/actions (bitbucket / github).

• Experience with Edge based network services from CDN's to security (i.e. BunnyCDN & Cloudflare).

• Working knowledge of DNS management, including platform migrations and integrations.

• Design and build extensible APIs/integrations in OO-PHP, either as standalone composer based packages, or WordPress plugins where code can be made reusable.

• Demonstrate understanding of PHP PSR coding standards (ideally PSR 12), ensuring that PHP code makes use of DocBlocks whilst producing well written code that follows best practises in regards to naming conventions and overall structure.

• Create and maintain supporting documentation as and when requested, ensuring that any 3rd party dependencies are also referenced as to their purpose and usage.

• Perform various data migrations, either manually via MySQL, PHP scripts or CLI tooling.

• Demonstrate a strong knowledge of both MySQL and the core WordPress WP_Query syntax with awareness of performance-led query optimisations and caching mechanisms and their implementation.

• Ability to produce technically accurate diagrams and/or instructions to help explain complex principles/processes, including data-driven schemas and/or architecture.

• Understand the use case for creating standalone database tables and bespoke schema if required, and be able to demonstrate how to use relational database keys and IDs for performant index queries

• Demonstrate understanding of the benefits and usage of various code standards and optimisation tools on projects, such as PHP CodeSniffer and PSR standard integrations.

• Understanding of WordPress CMS data structure, including Custom Post Types, Taxonomies, Plugin ecosystem and how these can be managed.

• Demonstrate understanding and ability to leverage infrastructure monitoring and logging tools to help debug code and identify potential issues before they cause critical problems.

Our technology stack

Candidates should be able to demonstrate experience working across the majority of our tech stack.

Server-side:

• PHP 8.0+ (OO-PHP)

• Composer for PHP package management

• Laravel Valet for local WordPress development environment setup and management

• Bespoke PHP framework based on Timber and twig view templates

• Node JS (v16+ for standalone React projects)

• Managing large data sets (CSV, JSON, XML) and importing/exporting from websites

Front-end:

• JavaScript, HTML5, SASS knowledge

• React for more complex UI-led experiences (standalone development)

• Webpack v5 for handling asset compilation, including theme images, JavaScript (and React), CSS files preprocessed via SCSS, supporting lazy loading/dynamic includes

• Yarn for npm package management dependencies and build scripts

• ViteJS as the build tool (standalone development)

• Twig (and/or other template engines)

Hosting & Infrastructure:

• AWS EC2 web servers for dedicated larger WordPress development projects running a linux based Ubuntu OS on AWS EC2 web instances, running PHP-fpm & Nginx, with a separate database powered by AWS RDS Aurora MySQL

• Dedicated WP Engine shared instances for smaller WordPress development projects

• Netlify for hosting standalone React/HTML development projects

• Additional AWS services also used based on requirements include: AWS ElastiCache (Redis), AWS Opensearch, AWS S3, AWS Cloudfront (CDN)

• Cloudflare for WAF security services and additional edge based caching (if required)

• BunnyCDN for global asset caching at larger scale (outside of AWS)

• Apache server configurations (NGINX also desirable)

Code management:

• Bitbucket for our code repositories

• Bitbucket pipelines for our automated deployment process for WordPress development

• Version control (e.g. Git)

Embodying our values

• Stronger together. You look out for your colleagues, offer support when it’s needed. While there may be disagreements, you handle these openly and respectfully.

• Own it. You take responsibility. You demonstrate determination and taking the initiative. You find solutions.

• Act boldly. You push yourself to go to new places knowing that you have the support of your team. You think big, speak up and are decisive.

• Trust more than our gut. You take pride in being an expert and learning from other experts. You are curious and experimental. You’re passionate about continually improving.