Lead Software Engineer - Digital Platforms

Standtogether; Arlington (VA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

6% 401(k) match with immediate vesting

Flexible time off

Comprehensive health and dental plans

Wellness and mental health support

Job summary

Stand Together is seeking a Lead Full-Stack Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across a large WordPress and Drupal ecosystem. You will stay hands-on while defining architecture, hosting, deployments, and platform direction, mentoring engineers and partnering with Product and stakeholders.

You will drive technical discovery, estimates, and risk assessment, while ensuring security, performance, and maintainability across dozens of sites and SaaS components.

Qualifications

• Eight or more years of professional software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead, staff engineer, or engineering lead for a team or portfolio.
• Hands-on with WordPress and Drupal at scale, including plugins, themes, and multisite considerations.
• Strong PHP experience, object-oriented design, and Composer.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture across the web ecosystem, including hosting and infrastructure strategy, integrations, and long-term platform direction.
• Stay hands-on, building, reviewing, and debugging alongside the engineers you lead.
• Own deployment and release processes, CI/CD, and automation.
• Own plugin, dependency, and security management across the portfolio, and set the patching and remediation cadence.
• Establish engineering and QA standards with the SDET team.
• Lead technical discovery and estimation with Product teams, and give credible estimates, dependencies, risks, and technical context.
• Participate in Product discovery where technical assessment is required, while Product retains responsibility for business prioritization.
• Manage stakeholder expectations and appropriately challenge requests, including saying when a commitment is not realistic and what the alternative is.
• Improve the triage, allocation, and sequencing of engineering work across the workstream.
• Mentor and develop engineers, and reduce key-person dependencies through documentation, knowledge sharing, and deliberate coverage.
• Develop a 12 to 24 month strategy for consolidating or migrating an appropriate WordPress and Drupal sites, and sequence that work against ongoing campaign demand.
• Identify opportunities to extend technical leadership across additional workstreams and technology stacks.
• Eight or more years of professional software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead, staff engineer, or engineering lead for a team or portfolio.
• A track record of remaining heavily hands-on while leading. This is not a management role with occasional coding.
• Strength in architecture and systems thinking across an ecosystem of applications rather than a single site.
• Sound technical judgment under pressure, and the ability to explain a technical trade-off to a non-technical stakeholder.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers, including senior individual contributors.
• Supervisory experience, including directly managing engineers, setting performance expectations, and conducting performance reviews.
• Reliable estimation, and the habit of surfacing risks, dependencies, and sequencing needs early.
• Comfort participating in product discovery and challenging requests respectfully while maintaining the relationship.
• Deep, current WordPress experience: custom themes and plugins, the block editor (Gutenberg), Advanced Custom Fields, WP-CLI, and multisite or large multi-site portfolios.
• Deep, current Drupal experience: custom modules and themes, Drupal 10 or later, the entity and configuration management systems, Views, Drush, Composer-based site builds, and headless or decoupled Drupal using JSON:API or GraphQL with a JavaScript front end.
• Strong modern PHP, including object-oriented design and Composer.
• Experience with SQL a must, including query performance work.
• Experience with front-end JavaScript (NextJs, React, etc.) and modern build tooling.
• Experience owning hosting, deployment pipelines, and environment configuration for production web platforms.
• Strong CI/CD and DevOps skills: building and maintaining automated build, test, and deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or comparable), infrastructure as code, containerization, environment and secrets management, and monitoring, logging, and alerting for production systems.
• Experience and general knowledge of SSL certificates, DNS, and web protocols.
• Upsun, AWS, and Cloudflare or comparable CDN experience preferred.
• Experience consolidating, migrating, or reducing a site portfolio preferred.
• Accessibility experience to WCAG 2.2 AA preferred.
• Experience working with marketing and campaign teams on tight timelines preferred.
• Track record of using AI-enabled tools and practices to accelerate your work.
• Enthusiasm to contribute to StandTogether's vision and principled approach to solving problems, and a commitment to stewarding our culture, which champions values including transformation and innovation, entrepreneurialism, humility, and respect.

Skills

Lead/Staff engineering

Architecture & systems thinking

WordPress

Drupal

PHP

JavaScript (Next.js/React)

CI/CD

DevOps

Mentoring engineers

Stakeholder management

Tools

WordPress

Drupal

Composer

WP-CLI

Drush

GraphQL

JSON:API

React

Next.js

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

AWS

Cloudflare

Docker

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Stand Together is a philanthropic community that helps America’s boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of our country’s biggest problems, from education to the economy, broken communities, and toxic division, among dozens of other pressing issues. We provide our partners with access to resources including funding, thought leadership, a network of peers, and a playbook for applying proven principles to transform lives and society.

As the Lead Full-Stack Software Engineer, you will provide the technical leadership for a large and complex web ecosystem, including approximately 140 WordPress sites supporting our Grassroots workstream as well as our Drupal properties. This is a working leadership role. You will stay hands‑on in the code while owning technical strategy, architecture, engineering standards, technical discovery and estimation, mentoring, work allocation, and the partnership with Product and stakeholders.

You will provide technical leadership across both our WordPress and Drupal platforms, beginning with the Grassroots workstream and extending across additional workstreams and technology stacks over time.

• Own architecture across the web ecosystem, including hosting and infrastructure strategy, integrations, and long‑term platform direction.

• Stay hands‑on. A meaningful share of your time is spent building, reviewing, and debugging alongside the engineers you lead.

• Own deployment and release processes, CI/CD, and automation, including plugin and dependency update automation.

• Own plugin, dependency, and security management across the portfolio, and set the patching and remediation cadence.

• Establish engineering and QA standards in partnership with our SDET team.

• Lead technical discovery and estimation, and give Product credible estimates, dependencies, risks, and technical context they can prioritize against.

• Participate in Product discovery where technical assessment is required, while Product retains responsibility for business prioritization.

• Manage stakeholder expectations and appropriately challenge requests, including saying when a commitment is not realistic and what the alternative is.

• Improve the triage, allocation, and sequencing of engineering work across the workstream.

• Mentor and develop engineers, and reduce key‑person dependencies through documentation, knowledge sharing, and deliberate coverage.

• Develop a 12 to 24 month strategy for consolidating or migrating an appropriate WordPress and Drupal sites, and sequence that work against ongoing campaign demand.

• Identify opportunities to extend technical leadership across additional workstreams and technology stacks.

• Eight or more years of professional software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead, staff engineer, or engineering lead for a team or portfolio.

• A track record of remaining heavily hands‑on while leading. This is not a management role with occasional coding.

• Strength in architecture and systems thinking across an ecosystem of applications rather than a single site.

• Sound technical judgment under pressure, and the ability to explain a technical trade‑off to a non‑technical stakeholder.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers, including senior individual contributors.

• Supervisory experience, including directly managing engineers, setting performance expectations, and conducting performance reviews.

• Reliable estimation, and the habit of surfacing risks, dependencies, and sequencing needs early.

• Comfort participating in product discovery and challenging requests respectfully while maintaining the relationship.

• Deep, current WordPress experience: custom themes and plugins, the block editor (Gutenberg), Advanced Custom Fields, WP-CLI, and multisite or large multi‑site portfolios.

• Deep, current Drupal experience: custom modules and themes, Drupal 10 or later, the entity and configuration management systems, Views, Drush, Composer‑based site builds, and headless or decoupled Drupal using JSON:API or GraphQL with a JavaScript front end.

• Strong modern PHP, including object‑oriented design and Composer.

• Experience with SQL a must, including query performance work.

• Experience with front‑end JavaScript (NextJs, React, etc.) and modern build tooling.

• Experience owning hosting, deployment pipelines, and environment configuration for production web platforms.

• Strong CI/CD and DevOps skills: building and maintaining automated build, test, and deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or comparable), infrastructure as code, containerization, environment and secrets management, and monitoring, logging, and alerting for production systems.

• Experience and general knowledge of SSL certificates, DNS, and web protocols.

• Upsun, AWS, and Cloudflare or comparable CDN experience preferred.

• Experience consolidating, migrating, or reducing a site portfolio preferred.

• Accessibility experience to WCAG 2.2 AA preferred.

• Experience working with marketing and campaign teams on tight timelines preferred.

• Track record of using AI‑enabled tools and practices to accelerate your work.

• Enthusiasm to contribute to StandTogether's vision and principled approach to solving problems, and a commitment to stewarding our culture, which champions values including transformation and innovation, entrepreneurialism, humility, and respect.

Competitive benefits:

Enjoy a 6% 401(k) match with immediate vesting, flexible time off, comprehensive health and dental plans, plus wellness and mental health support through Peloton and Talkspace.

A meaningful career:

Join a passionate community of over 1,400 employees dedicated to improving lives and driving innovative solutions to complex social challenges.

Commitment to growth:

Thrive in a non‑hierarchical environment that empowers employees to discover, develop and apply their unique talents.

Our Values:

Working for an organization within the Stand Together philanthropic community is different from many other places. The culture is deeply rooted in Principle Based Management (PBM), a framework guided by the principles that drive human progress, such as dignity, openness, and bottom‑up empowerment. PBM empowers employees to be entrepreneurial, to innovate, and to continually drive transformation.

We believe diversity fuels creativity, broadens knowledge, and helps drive success. That is why we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and strive to treat all employees and applicants with honesty, dignity, and respect.