XWP - Principal WordPress Engineer - PT - Freelance - LATAM/US/Canada

About the Company

XWP has collaborated on some of the most ambitious and successful WordPress projects and partnered with the likes of Google, Forbes, News Corp, and Penske Media Corporation (PMC) to bring richer technologies and delightful user experiences to the open web.

You’ll be joining a team of 60+ experts (from 25+ countries and 6 continents) who enjoy challenging work, service-focused and collaborative teammates, and opportunities to grow and learn. We have a passion and enthusiasm for our craft and a sincere care for each other and the clients we serve.

The Principal Engineer is responsible for overseeing cross-team project commitments, defining our technical vision, solving challenging problems, and representing XWP to our clients and stakeholders. They are our go-to experts for multiple codebases and skillsets.

About the Role

Who You Are

• You are an enthusiastic WordPress advocate
• You are fueled by a balanced blend of humility and confidence
• You have a demonstrated appetite for continued learning, creativity, and problem-solving
• You value autonomy and have the self-management skills to operate dependably in a fully remote role
• You’re an excellent communicator, both written and verbal
• You strongly resonate with XWP’s values of giving, mastery, and teamwork

What You’ve Done

• You’ve led the technical direction of large scale and long term WordPress projects
• You’ve actively participated in giving feedback and guiding less experienced developers to follow best practices through code reviews
• You’ve built complex custom WordPress plugins from scratch
• You’ve contributed to or built internal tools to help your team’s productivity, velocity, and communication
• You’ve worked extensively with PHP, WordPress, React, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

Experiences that we also value but aren’t requirements:

• You’ve led a team of 5+ engineers
• You’ve invested heavily in developing, coaching, and mentoring engineers by working on growth plans, personal improvement plans, via 1:1s, and the like
• You’ve actively participated in hiring engineers, including sourcing, interviewing, evaluating, and onboarding
• You have proven success building scalable engineering teams, including structure, culture, processes, and documentation

Skills & Qualifications

What You’ll Do at XWP
Provide Technical leadership

• Lead out some of our most complex and challenging large scale enterprise WordPress projects, making decisions in alignment with organizational goals
• Write clear, readable, maintainable, production-ready code and provide in-depth code review to team members
• Serve as an expert within XWP for multiple codebases and related skillsets (Backend, Frontend, Web Performance, Gutenberg), including the breadth of components and how they interact
• Take responsibility for organizational practices and processes and their continuous improvement
• Foster a culture of mentoring and support others in their growth as mentors
• Promote big picture prioritization, clearly communicated expectation setting, and cost-vs-value economic thinking across the organization

Be An Engaged Team Member

• Deliver praise and constructive feedback across the organization and work to foster a culture of seeking out feedback and using it as a tool for growth
• Demonstrate the cultural value of effective communication: Identifying the audience and listening to understand
• Foster a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing, where people are encouraged to share in a respectful manner

Write Secure, Performant, Scalable Code

• Develop custom WordPress plugins for use at enterprise scale
• Create custom React-based Gutenberg Blocks
• Utilize WordPress technologies like WP-CLI and the WP-REST-API
• Use package management and build tools as part of CI/CD workflows
• Implement WordPress, PHP, Javascript and CSS best practices across projects
• Debug across a wide range of browsers and devices

Strategic impact

• Support our organization's strategies and how they relate to the engineering discipline, our processes, workflows and technical guidelines
• Understand and work at a strategic level, influencing decisions to achieve organizational alignment on major goals and ensure successful implementation
• Actively seek to create or redefine roadmaps across the organization with project & business counterparts

Additional Information

XWP is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members. We’re proud of the high levels of inclusion that our distributed team reports and we work hard to support each individual doing their best work together at XWP.