Staff WordPress Platform Architect

Servers.com by Nexcess; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 155,000; Full time

Job summary

Nexcess is hiring several Staff Software Engineers to own platform-scale architecture and guide multiple teams. You will define target architecture for Platform Cloud and Products & Solutions, balancing performance, reliability, and migrations across WordPress product lines.

You will write code and design documents, advocating upgrade‑safe changes while keeping backward compatibility for a large installed base. Remote-friendly, with overlap hours in US Eastern time.

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 a rollback plan you either needed or could genuinely have used
• The ability to reason about cost, reliability, and operational burden, not only correctness. A design that is right and unaffordable is not right
• Excellent written communication. You can disagree with a director in writing and be right about it, and also be wrong about it and move on without drama
• A degree in Computer Science or a related field is welcome; equivalent practical experience is equally welcome

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

PHP 8.x mastery

WordPress expertise

Technical leadership

Linux fundamentals

Bash scripting

Performance optimization

Architecture design

Remote collaboration

Education

CS degree or related field

Tools

WP-CLI

nginx

PHP-FPM

MySQL/MariaDB

Redis/Memcached

Bash

Job description

Nexcess is hiring several Staff Software Engineers to own platform-scale architecture and guide multiple teams. You will define target architecture for Platform Cloud and Products & Solutions, balancing performance, reliability, and migrations across WordPress product lines.

You will write code and design documents, advocating upgrade‑safe changes while keeping backward compatibility for a large installed base. Remote-friendly, with overlap hours in US Eastern time.