Website Development Lead

Summary

Join Newsela as a Website Development Lead Contractor and help deliver high-quality solutions for Newsela.com, Formative.com, and GenerationGenius.com. Provide technical leadership and direction for implementing new features and lead the implementation of architectural and technical best practices. Review requests with Marketing and Product leaders, working cross-functionally to refine scope and requirements. Refine and break down work into iterative deliverables, guide the team in setting sprint goals, and organize sprints to ensure high-quality, timely delivery. Partner with Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design to refine ambiguous goals into clearly defined work items. This role requires 7+ years of website development experience using PHP and MySQL, and advanced knowledge of custom WordPress development.

Requirements

• Have 7+ years of experience in website development using PHP and MySQL
• Have built complex web applications with maintainable solutions that work and call various services and APIs
• Advanced knowledge of custom Wordpress development, including data modeling and infrastructure
• Advanced knowledge and ability to leverage semantic HTML, responsive CSS, and modern design patterns to meet your team’s goals
• Be able to communicate technical concepts and processes in English with at least a professional level of proficiency
• Proficient in English to enable effective communication and collaboration
• Take pride in your ability to identify missing requirements early in the development cycle, create and maintain performant and scalable backend systems, write resilient and testable code, and deliver on sprint commitments

Responsibilities

• Help the team deliver high-quality solutions for the marketing experience for Newsela.com, Formative.com and GenerationGenius.com
• Provide technical leadership and direction for implementation of new features
• Lead and implement architectural and technical best practices
• Review requests with leaders from Marketing and Product and work cross-functionally to refine scope and requirements
• Refine and break bodies of work into small and iterative deliverables, guide the team in setting achievable sprint goals and organize sprints to ensure work is delivered with a high degree of quality and in a timely manner
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design to refine ambiguous goals into clearly defined, iterative work items

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Laravel
• Experience with AWS
• Advanced understanding of modern web app architecture and web fundamentals
• Intermediate to advanced understanding of developer tooling and unit test writing
• Experience with incorporating and working with REST API’s
• Intermediate to advanced understanding of relational databases