Staff WordPress Engineer

Role Description

This is not a Senior Engineer role with a bigger title. We are hiring several Staff Software Engineers whose scope is an entire platform area or several teams, and whose primary output is technical direction as much as code.

Nexcess is consolidating a significant amount of infrastructure and software under one architecture. That work is genuinely hard:

• Multiple hosting platforms
• A portfolio of WordPress products installed on millions of sites
• Real customers on all of it, with no appetite for breaking any of them

We need engineers who can hold that whole picture, decide what the target architecture should be, and then bring several teams along with them. If your instinct on reading that is "who owns the migration path, and what is the rollback story," this is the role.

There are two areas, and we will work out the best fit with you during the process rather than asking you to choose up front:

• Platform Cloud: Covers the hosting platform: provisioning and lifecycle, the PHP request path, caching architecture, database performance, and the reliability and cost profile of customer sites at scale.
• Products and Solutions: Covers our WordPress product portfolio: core APIs, the Block Editor, and the architecture that lets us ship upgrade-safe code to an enormous and completely uncontrolled installed base.

Both areas want the same person: 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 the code. And you know which of those is worth fixing given what it costs.

This is a permanently remote full-time position with a pay range of $60k to $155k per year. 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. At this level, a meaningful part of the job is unblocking other people, and that requires being reachable.

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

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.
• 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.

Benefits

• Very few engineers get to make architectural calls with both the infrastructure and the software in view.
• 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.
• Async by default, decisions written down, meetings reserved for the things that actually need a conversation.
• Writing matters significantly in this role.