Senior WordPress Engineer

Posted on 05/07/2022

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Posted: Wednesday 6th July 2022
Type: Full Time, Permanent
Location: Leeds (remote or hybrid working available)
Salary: £38,000-£54,000 depending on experience

Introduction

Mixd is looking for a Senior WordPress Engineer with at least 4 years experience in a web engineering role. You’ll have a comprehensive understanding of modern web development, with an emphasis on PHP and modern JavaScript in a WordPress context. This is a remote position – you can be based anywhere in the UK.

About the role

As a Senior WordPress Engineer you’ll bring a blend of front-end and back-end expertise, leading the planning and development of projects, features, functionality and logic across enterprise-level projects for the NHS and other public sectors.

A comprehensive understanding of the components and technologies related to WordPress is essential to this role. To enable you to architect complex WordPress projects, you should also have knowledge of the larger WordPress ecosystem, including commonly used third-party libraries.

You must have excellent knowledge of modern web technologies and best practices, including semantic HTML and modern CSS and extensive experience building PHP applications. You should also have a solid understanding of MySQL and database-driven applications. You will be familiar with the tools required for engineering projects including a good understanding of Git, conflict resolution, local development environments, PHP configuration, coding standards, accessibility and information security. You should also be willing to adapt and help evolve our established processes at Mixd.

The responsibilities and expectations of a Senior Engineer are not necessarily tied to a specific project. While you will need to apply your skills on each project you are assigned to, you are also expected to set a similar example when interacting with the whole engineering team for meta-level tasks. This could be cross-project code reviews, helping other engineers debug problems, coaching, or offering advice and architectural guidance to other projects. You will lead by example when working on projects, meeting with clients and giving feedback to peers. It’s both your responsibility to voice concerns about technical decisions being made, but also have the distance and maturity to accept decisions made by the team and/or project technical lead and commit yourself to build solutions in the agreed-upon way.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the planning, development, testing, and deployment process of assigned projects.
  • Write, test, refactor and optimise code to achieve high benchmarks for performance and strive to make quality assurance a top priority.
  • Provide regular communication with the internal project teams and with clients.
  • Provide day-to-day direction, training and leadership for more junior engineers.
  • Diagnose, troubleshoot and action technical issues and support requests for existing clients.
  • Ensuring products are accessible and meet WCAG guidelines.
  • Ensuring high standards are maintained via testing and QA.
  • Carry out web accessibility testing, audits and expert reviews.
  • Planning and interpreting project requirements and writing technical user stories.
  • Write technical documentation for project architecture and internal processes.
  • Plan, manage and deliver training, sprints calls and retrospectives.
  • Keep up-to-date with emerging technologies and support the development of standards and processes that contribute to an environment of continual improvement.

Requirements

  • A minimum of four years experience in a Developer role.
  • Experience working in cross-discipline teams with design, UX/UI, and project management.
  • Experience working in an agile environment, scoping and road-mapping etc.
  • Ability to manage your own workload.
  • In-depth understanding of engineering with PHP and Javascript.
  • Excellent understanding of WordPress theme and plugin development.
  • Experience with current development tools, processes and standards (i.e. Composer, NPM, Git, Sass, Twig, Docker)
  • Experience with JavaScript (React, jQuery)
  • Strong skills in PHP frameworks such as Laravel (may be developed on the job)
  • Experience working with REST APIs.
  • Familiarity with a variety of cloud providers (Digital Ocean, Rackspace, AWS, Cloudflare etc)
  • Knowledge of web performance and speed/memory optimisation techniques.
  • Knowledge of usability, accessibility and testing tools.
  • Knowledge of web security best practices.

About us

Mixd is a highly respected user experience digital agency specialising in information design. Over the last 18 years, we have designed and built websites that are robust, usable, secure and meet user needs, using modern, open-source technologies for the NHS, Police, local Councils and many other public sectors. We are a multi-disciplined team of 13 designers, developers and UX experts and have established ourselves as one of the NHS’ leading digital partners. We are also one of the leading providers of enterprise-ready WordPress solutions and bring open source solutions to the public sector. Making sure the services we create work for everyone is really important to us at Mixd. We have a proven track record in web accessibility and have been involved with web standards since it began. We are also involved in the wider accessibility community, running training and contributing to WCAG standards. Importantly, we have extensive experience in delivering accessibility audits for public sector services and are familiar with the service standard and GOV.UK design patterns. More recently, we have developed Gutenberg Block Library (based on the NHS Digital Service Manual) and a PHP based Server Side Rendered (SSR) component system that allows us to completely separate logic from presentation and also enables a development workflow comparable to javascript implementations such as React and Vue.

Location

We are a remote-first business, with people based all around the UK. However, our Leeds city centre studio, just a few minutes walk from Leeds railway station, is open for those that want to work onsite or you can do a combination of both. You will need to work both independently and as part of a remote team and will have the opportunity to meet the rest of the company at our annual company meet-up and with members of the rest of your team on a regular basis.

The package

We offer a competitive salary, negotiable depending on qualifications and experience. On top of this we have a generous benefits package, including pension scheme, flexible hours, 25 days holiday growing to 30 days over time, paid social events, bike schemes and a wellbeing scheme.

The benefits

  • Flexible hours and opportunity to work from home.
  • A creative office environment above Leeds station.
  • Annual £1000 personal learning and development allowance.
  • Coaching programme for professional and personal development.
  • Up to 30 days annual leave (pro rata).
  • Apple MacBook Pro and monitor.
  • Competitive salary and annual discretionary bonus.
  • Employer contributed pension.
  • Annual Christmas jaunt abroad.
  • Regular social events subsidised by the company.
  • Generous maternity and shared parental leave package.
  • Cycle to work scheme.
  • £40 per month wellbeing budget.

How to apply

Apply online:

Apply now

If you have any questions around the role, we’d be pleased to answer them. Send a message to [email protected] and we’ll get back to you.

Please note:

  • Applicants must be eligible to work in the UK.
  • Appointments will be made subject to a background check
  • We work a flexible hybrid of remote and/or together in our Leeds studio.
  • You may be required to attend in person for some workshops or events, so expect some face-to-face contact and travel now and then.
  • We welcome remote applicants from anywhere in the UK, assuming you’re able and happy to travel to gather with the rest of the team in Leeds once a month or so.
  • We aim to get in touch with candidates within two weeks of contacting us.
  • Our selection process starts with a 1-to-1 informal chat prior to an interview with some of the team.
  • Mixd is an equal opportunities employer committed to ensuring that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race.

Please, no recruitment agencies! You’ll be wasting your time and ours.