Senior Backend Software Engineer (PHP/Python) - Contractor

Previous experience with PHP and Python is required for this position. Knowledge of Node.js, Django and/or WordPress is appreciated, but not mandatory.

Here is a list describing the tasks involved in this position (do you happen to like making lists? So do we!):

• Contribute to continuously improving our services (backend, e-commerce, backoffice) to deliver the best user experience through our products.

• Scope, lead, and collaborate on technical solutions and specifications for user stories and EPICs in our backlog.

• Collaborate with your cross-functional Product & Engineering team in each sprint to pull in ready-to-build user stories and get each built, tested, and released.

• Review and test pull requests and collaborate with your peers to ensure our code meets standards, achieves the desired outcome, and does not cause side-effects.

• Seek opportunities to improve the quality of our services, make products run faster, be easier to maintain, and be more reliable, secure, robust, and scalable.

• Collaboratively contribute to our internal agentic AI setup, code libraries, process improvements, and functional and technical decisions.

During this journey, you will get cross-training and growth opportunities by working with your fellow engineering teammates on internal projects, covering several languages and various technical stacks.

You will join a team and a company with a strong engineering culture where continuous improvements, collaboration with peers, and autonomy are key values. Our engineering teams frequently meet to share their learnings and feedback and maintain public documentation of our best practices (for instance, check out our public engineering handbook!). We also regularly dedicate time to codebase maintenance, open-source contribution and best-practice refinements: we believe having a great developer experience requires effort but leads to better products in the long run. We are embracing AI-driven development and continuously building and improving our internal agentic system to improve our productivity and the quality of our products.

You are a skilled, passionate, and humble software engineer who is friendly, collaborative, and supportive. Solving problems and building solutions that help people are the values that make your work special and rewarding.

• Consider how your work impacts others.

At WP Media, one of our values is "user first": we do what is best for them, and we work to offer them an exceptional experience with our products. You consider how the code we build impacts them. You value personal growth and constructive feedback. People feel good around you because you love sharing what you know while continuously improving yourself, remaining thoughtful and flexible in your approach.

• Proficient knowledge of English.

Empathetic and collaborative communication is key: you are comfortable writing, speaking, and listening in English with technical and non-technical teammates.

Work Experience

• Solid PHP & Python expertise.

You will bring proven experience in building, improving, and maintaining PHP and Python solutions. You develop using modern techniques (for example, OOP, unit & integration testing, observability, AI assistance). You have experience in developing but also releasing and maintaining services used by tens of thousands of users.

• You own your developments.

Framing issues and identifying solutions makes you thrive. You are not satisfied with simply expediting tickets and issues, but you want to own the projects and codebases you work on and actively take part in its evolution. You want to drive continuous improvement by enhancing embedded tests, best practices, and keeping the stack up to date.

• Experience with automated code validation & testing.

You think code should comply with the team's standards as well as best practices. You value automated code validation to do pre-code reviews while reducing the load of manual code review process. You have experience with automated testing, i.e. unit, integration, and maybe even end-to-end acceptance testing. You value how granular tests prove that your code works as expected even in unexpected conditions. You are convinced that qualitative codebases and testsuites are enablers of AI productivity gains.

• Love quality, AI-driven development and continuous improvement.

Quality and continuous improvement drive you, and you apply this to your usage of AI. You know that quality means the code not only works but works as expected in many different environments and conditions. You insist on code being reliable, complete, robust, and stable. You are a builder and a collaborator, working with your teammates to continuously improve our agentic system, practices, processes, code, tools, and pipelines.

Do you bring even more to the table?

Do you want to know a few other things we appreciate about our candidates? Don’t worry if you don’t have experience in any of these areas; we can teach you and learn together along the way!

• Expertise in Django, WordPress and/or Node.js

Most of the software you will work on is implemented using Django (Python) or WordPress (PHP). Some services are written in Node.js. Are you familiar with those frameworks/runtime environments? Great, you’ll be up to speed quickly! Otherwise, we will teach you.

• Not afraid of DevOps activities

Deploying and running products, services and websites is as important as developing them. While we have a team dedicated to those activities, you will assist them as the expert of the services you developed. You might be familiar with Kubernetes, Chef, Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, and Kibana? If you don’t, don’t worry: We will teach you!

Do you want to know three other things we appreciate about our candidates?

• Previous remote job experience.
  Slack will be your virtual office, where all the life of the company takes place.

If you are excited about providing technical assistance to our customers, this is the perfect opportunity for you.