As a Senior Full Stack Developer, you will be a key player in architecting, developing, and deploying innovative websites, e-commerce platforms, and web applications. You will work across the entire product lifecycle, from concept to deployment, as part of a high-performing, multi-disciplinary team.
This role goes beyond standard web development, focusing heavily on building scalable infrastructures and integrating cutting-edge AI solutions to create next-generation user experiences. It also assumes you write with AI in the loop. We treat AI-assisted coding neither as a shortcut nor as a threat: we expect you to move faster with it, and to review what it produces as if you were the one on call that night.
Two things changed what we build. The web is now read by machines as much as by people, so the sites and shops you ship have to be legible to answer engines and to agents that browse, compare and buy on someone’s behalf. And accessibility stopped being optional: clients selling to EU consumers fall under the European Accessibility Act, with WCAG 2.1 AA as the working standard. The team is based in the Greater Porto area and works in a hybrid model, using the best of existing technologies and building customized solutions on top of them.
Key Responsibilities
- Full-Stack Applications: Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable full-stack applications with a focus on websites, e-commerce and apps.
- APIs & Microservices: Develop and integrate APIs and manage microservices architecture to ensure seamless functionality.
- AI-Powered Experiences: Lead the integration of AI-powered solutions to create personalized web experiences (recommendation engines, personal shoppers, virtual try-ons and so on). Design them so a human can always see why the system decided what it decided.
- Front-End & Performance: Implement UX/UI designs from Figma, developing responsive and high-performance front-end components. Own the performance budget and the Core Web Vitals that follow from it, INP included, because on commerce sites they move revenue, not just a score.
- Accessibility: Build to WCAG 2.1 AA as the default, not as a remediation phase. Semantic markup, keyboard paths, focus states and contrast, tested with real assistive technology rather than an automated scan alone.
- Machine-Readable Web: Ship front ends that machines can read: clean structured data, stable semantics, and the emerging agent-facing layer such as llms.txt, which is now deployed on hundreds of thousands of sites. Work with our SEO and GEO teams so a client’s catalogue is legible to an answer engine before anyone asks an agent to buy from it.
- Testing & Delivery: Manage testing, debugging, and participate in quality assurance to ensure product excellence. Work behind CI gates: unit and integration tests, end-to-end coverage on the paths that carry money, and a rollback you have actually used.
- Security Baseline: Treat the OWASP Top 10 as a checklist you can defend, not a slide. Dependency and secret scanning in the pipeline, sane CSP headers, and authentication done with a standard rather than invented.
- Hosting, Infrastructure & Observability: Manage and optimize web hosting environments (dedicated servers, VPS and similar) to ensure maximum uptime, performance, and security for all deployed applications. Instrument what you deploy, so that when something breaks at 8am the answer comes from a dashboard and not from a guess.
- AI in the Workflow: Help set how the team uses AI to write, review and test code: what gets automated, what always gets human eyes, and how we keep speed from turning into a mess someone else inherits.
Technical & Platform Skills
- Education: Bachelor or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- Experience: Proven professional experience as a Full Stack Developer. At senior level that means production systems you have owned end to end, not only features you have shipped.
- Front-end: Proficiency with front-end technologies: HTML, CSS, and modern JavaScript (ES6+). TypeScript and at least one modern framework in production, React and Next.js being the ones we use most.
- Back-end: Experience with back-end technologies such as Node.js, Python, or PHP. Production-shaped APIs: authentication, rate limiting, migrations and versioning, not just endpoints that return JSON.
- Web platforms: Experience in developing for the web, particularly WordPress/WooCommerce/Flutter, Shopify and/or Webflow. Exposure to headless or composable setups is a strong plus, since more of our commerce work is going that way.
- Servers & databases: Hands-on experience with server-side configuration and database management to ensure robust and secure deployments. Comfort with a relational database beyond CRUD: indexes, query plans and migrations that run on a live system.
- DNS & certificates: Practical experience with Domain Name System (DNS) management, SSL certificate implementation, and domain purchasing and transfers.
- Performance & accessibility: Ability to profile a slow page and fix it rather than describe it, and working knowledge of WCAG 2.1 AA as something you build in from the first component.
- Testing, CI/CD & security: Automated testing at more than one level, a pipeline with gates that can actually block a release, and familiarity with the OWASP Top 10 and with dependency and secret scanning.
- AI-assisted development: Fluent use of AI coding tools in daily work, and the discipline that has to come with it: reviewing generated code, asking for the failure modes before the implementation, and knowing which problems are not worth handing over.
Behavioral Skills
- Technical Leadership: Provide technical leadership and mentorship, helping to solve problems and suggesting improvements within the development team.
- Judgement over Speed: You can move fast with AI and still be the person who catches what it got wrong. Shipping something you would not want to maintain is not speed, it is debt with a deadline.
- Initiative: Propose innovative ideas and lead initiatives to solve complex client needs and technical challenges.
- Agile Collaboration: Collaborate within an agile project management system, participating in sprints and planning sessions.
- Clear Communication: Work closely with project managers, providing clear updates on progress, blockers, and realistic deadlines.
- Discovery Mindset: Participate in discovery meetings with developers, designers, and e-commerce managers to contribute to the overall product strategy.
- Kindness: At Wise Pirates we promote and admire kindness, independently of rhythm, intensity and efficiency.
- Analytical Mindset: Capable of putting data first and obsessed with insight building, always with client satisfaction and business results in mind.
- AI Readiness: Interest and fluency in using AI as a partner to deliver efficient value, respecting security and privacy regulations.
- Innovation Lover: Someone seeking continuous growth and desiring to be part of innovative solutions.
- Results-Oriented Zeal: An unwavering commitment to the client’s bottom line, pushing boundaries to chase the best overall performance and business goals.
Nice to Have
- Experience with modern JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue.js, Angular).
- Deep knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Know-how in microservices architecture.
- Proficiency with PHP frameworks (Laravel, CodeIgniter).
- Experience using project management tools like ClickUp.
- Familiarity with web performance optimization tools.
- Experience with headless or composable commerce (Shopify Hydrogen, commercetools, Saleor).
- Experience building or consuming MCP servers, or other machine-facing interfaces to a product.
- Observability in practice: OpenTelemetry, structured logging, and alerts someone actually acts on.