Staff WordPress Engineer

About this role

About Nexcess

Nexcess delivers specialized cloud infrastructure designed for environments where peak performance and rigorous compliance are non-negotiable. Supporting a global client base ranging from high-growth agencies to mission-critical enterprise operations, we have established a legacy rooted in technical proficiency and collaborative client success. Our managed environments are backed by a dedicated team of experts committed to operational excellence and reliable execution when it counts most.
We also build the software that runs on top of that infrastructure — The Events Calendar, LearnDash, and Kadence among them — installed on millions of WordPress sites worldwide.
Compensation: Base salary is based on experience and will range from $120,000-$155,000
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, and 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 managed WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento hosting platform: provisioning and lifecycle, the PHP request path, caching architecture, database performance, server automation, 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. 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

• Drive the automation of operational work — provisioning, configuration, and maintenance that should not depend on somebody remembering the right sequence of commands

• 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

Skills, Competencies, and 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 on Linux as an operating system, not just as the place your code happens to run: process and service management, systemd, filesystems and permissions, networking fundamentals, and reading a system that is under load

• Working shell scripting, and a track record of automating operational work rather than repeating it. You write bash for deployments, migrations, and diagnostics, and you have opinions about when a shell script should have become something else

• Deep familiarity with the hosting stack: nginx or Apache, PHP-FPM worker pools and tuning, MySQL or MariaDB query performance, and object caching with Redis or Memcached. You can profile a slow request, say which layer is responsible, 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…