Lead WordPress Developer for Fast-Growing Pet Company (Remote/Worldwide)

d web developer who loves WordPress? And do you get excited about building new features that will be used by millions of pet lovers every month? Then this could very well be the opportunity for you!
We’re Pangolia — one of the fastest-growing pet companies, and we’re on a mission to create the biggest, most helpful pet company in the world. Our largest sites: Catster.com, Dogster.com, Hepper.com, and PangoVet.com are visited by more than 36 million pet lovers every year, and we’re undergoing rapid growth.
Our media sites are all built on WordPress, and our own cat furniture e-commerce brand, Hepper, is running on WooCommerce.
In this position you would be the lead web developer, which will consist of fixing the issues that come up, proactively keeping our sites secure, and building new things.
We’re a 100% remote company so you’d have the freedom to work from anywhere. It’s a full-time position (40 hours a week), yet you get to plan your own schedule and work whenever you want. You will become an integral member of our team at Pangolia consisting of a diverse group of more than 30+ talented individuals from all over the world, joining us on our united goal of building the biggest, most helpful pet company in the world.
📌 Note: We’re a team who believes in working hard to get great results, but you won’t be micromanaged to get there. What we provide is flexibility, ownership over your workstream, real responsibility, and pay for every single hour you work. But with every benefit comes an expectation. In owning the workstream, we might need you when it goes wrong (even on evenings or weekends). With responsibility, we need someone who will rise to that challenge and wants to be in that position.
💻 We’re looking for a fullstack developer. However, for this position, it is much more important to be great at backend coding than frontend design. Our sites already look great on the front end, but it’s mainly on the back end where a lot of work needs to be done (we also have graphic designers on our team).
💬 Strong communication and team collaboration skills are a MUST. We’re a remote company, so great communication is a fundamental part of making the company thrive.
—> All in all, this is a great opportunity if you’re an amazing developer looking to rapidly grow your skills whilst working alongside peers who are at the top of their field.
Big projects in front of us right now:
Make our websites the fastest loading websites when compared to our competitors, and have fewer display ads than the competition.
Build out the https://www.hepper.com e-commerce experience: revamping checkout pages, category pages, product listings, and making sure that data analytics on Hepper is properly configured.
Clearing the big backlog of tasks that has piled up over the last couple of months. We are behind, and we have lots to do, so it’s important that you hit the ground running!
In this role, you would over the next 3-4 months hire 1-2 developers in your department. So, it’s crucial that you’re excited about managing, inspiring, and doing code reviews with other developers too.
You will be responsible for
Making the webdev department kickass: catching up with the backlog of tasks, and being an amazing communicator.
After 3-4 hiring months: hiring 1-2 web developers who will work under you. It’s therefore important you are excited about hiring, managing, and doing code reviews with developers. We can help teach you the skills to hire and manage developers, though, you must be excited about this for this to work.
Developing new tools and software that help millions of pet lovers every month (could for example be to develop a Puppy Weight Chart Tool / Calculator that helps pet owners predict how fast, and how big their dog will grow).
Developing, testing, and maintaining new features and solutions for our WordPress sites for desktop and mobile browsers that are optimized for high traffic.
Create, review, and update technical documentation such as contributing to our development processes, QA procedures, and technical planning.
Communicating and supporting our content and marketing departments with dev/IT requests, troubleshooting, fixing bugs
Performing scheduled and non-scheduled maintenance and security updates on our WordPress sites.
Always proactively being on top of things and securing and protecting our WordPress sites from hackers and malware, as well as eliminating risks.
Be informed of relevant new technology and best practices.
You are expected to have:
Experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, and PHP
Experience with MySQL and managing databases
Experience with WordPress development (e.g. themes, hooks, filters, plugin API, etc)
Experience with build tools like Webpack or ViteJS
Experience with Composer and a basic understanding of autoloading, dependency management, and dependency injection
Experience with SSH and comfortable with basic terminal usage
Experience with Git (and GitHub)
Troubleshooting abilities (ie include finding CSS and JavaScript conflicts using browser developer tools, navigating codebases in theme and plugins, and determining whether a plugin or theme code could be causing a code conflict)
The ability to take a project on your own and get it done before the deadline
Strong communication skills. This is a MUST as we work remotely. (most of our communication is written in Slack with occasional calls)
The Type of Person We Would Love For This Role
—> You’re a dependable, friendly communicator
—> You’re passionate about solving problems with smart and elegant programming solutions. Your code is clean, understandable, and well-commented
—> You’re a self-starter who loves taking initiative and seeing things through to completion
—> You have the curiosity and desire to learn and grow your skills and discover new modern practices and follow the latest trends in WordPress