About the position:
The Wirecutter is seeking an experienced back-end engineer to join our Website and Content Management System team. This is a new position on a team of 4+ engineers, reporting to the Engineering Manager and working closely with product managers and designers. Successful candidates thrive in a fast-paced environment, think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate, solve problems, write quality code, and ship features that achieve business goals.
As a back-end engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in building the next generation of our platform. You will develop and improve publishing workflows for internal users, REST API endpoints for consumption by the front-end of our application, WordPress plugins and templates, and whatever other functionality the team needs.
You should be comfortable working remotely, and, ideally, you have experience working on a distributed development team.
We have a strong focus on scale, reliability, performance and product agility, and that means picking the right tool for the job, while still being pragmatic and flexible.
The tech stack for the CMS team consists of mainly:
- WordPress - content and user management
- PHP - server-side business logic and custom REST API endpoints
- WP-CLI - command line interface for extracting reports and running batch processes
- JavaScript/jQuery - client-side event handling
- Grunt - task automation
- Sass/CSS - markup styles
- Elasticsearch - indexes content for search queries
About The Wirecutter:
Founded five years ago by journalists fed up with the time and energy it takes to shop, The Wirecutter (which includes its sister site The Sweethome) developed a simpler approach to giving buying advice: just tell people exactly what to get in one single guide. The company’s purpose: to help people find great things, quickly and easily. Through rigorous testing, research, reporting, and whatever means necessary, they create straightforward recommendations that save readers from unnecessary stress, time, and effort. We then monetize these guides by enabling our readers to easily purchase the products they are interested in.
The Wirecutter was recently acquired by, and is now a subsidiary of The New York Times Company. As part of the acquisition, the Times is investing in The Wirecutter to accelerate its business through editorial category expansion, development of more robust product features and unlocking new revenue streams.
Responsibilities:
- Building scalable, high-quality, and innovative product features in WordPress
- Writing code that is simple, reliable, maintainable, performant, functional, and compatible across devices and browsers
- Designing applications with extensibility in mind, while considering efficiency, and the burden of developer onboarding
- Debugging issues reported in our production environment
- Providing level of effort estimates and specifications for upcoming project tasks
- Understanding requirements, discuss trade-offs, and collaborate on the best approach to solving a problem
- Succinctly communicating complex problems and proposed solutions, in writing, and in conversation
- Performing code reviews with meaningful feedback
- Testing and troubleshooting with automated testing or manual quality assurance
Qualifications:
- 3+ years experience developing for WordPress as a content management system
- 3+ years experience with PHP
- Understanding of object oriented software principles and design patterns
- Comfortable using git and the command line
- A demonstrated ability to work collaboratively as part of a multidisciplinary team
- Strong communication skills
- Comfortable working without micro-management of day to day task
Nice to Haves:
- Experience with modern PHP frameworks (Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, etc.)
- Experience developing and consuming RESTful web services
- Working knowledge of Elasticsearch
- Experience with AWS and Docker
- Experience with automation, build tools, release engineering
- Experience with Apple News, Google Analytics, Doubleclick for Publishers, Google AMP, and Facebook Instant
Culture and benefits at The New York Times Company and The Wirecutter:
- Though The Wirecutter has physical locations in both NYC and LA, the company promotes and encourages a remote workforce, so that our employees can work in flexible and comfortable ways.
- We are committed to career development, supported by a formal mentoring program as well as tuition reimbursement. The New York Times Company offers frequent panel discussions and talks by industry leaders (Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates and Ta-Nehisi Coates are a few recent examples), that we encourage our employees to attend.
- We believe diversity fuels innovation and creativity, and we have a variety of employee groups and task forces across The New York Times Company and The Wirecutter dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.
- We offer a generous parental leave policy, which was recently expanded in response to employee feedback. Birth mothers receive 16 weeks fully paid, adoptive parents and birth fathers receive 10 weeks also fully paid. Similarly, we offer competitive health and dental insurance, as well as 401(k) matching.
To apply: austen.lein@nytimes.com
