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

👉 Are you a talented 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 PetKeen.com are visited by more than 60 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 80 talented individuals from all over the world, joining us on our united goal of building the biggest, most helpful pet

 Note: we’re a fast-paced kickass team with very high expectations of ourselves and each other, and we work really hard. The webdev department needs to become kickass, so this position will definitely require working on some weekends.

 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:

1.  Make Catster.com, Dogster.com, PetKeen.com, and Hepper.com the fastest loading websites when compared to our competitors, and have fewer display ads than the competition.
2.  Build out the Hepper.com e-commerce experience: revamping checkout pages, category pages, product listings, and making sure that data analytics on Hepper is properly configured.
3.  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!
4. 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

• 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 are 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
• —> You’re able to juggle around and work on different projects and side tasks on a weekly basis. While we wish we could focus on one thing for weeks at a time to make it perfect, that’s often not the reality in a competitive market.

Some things to know about our workflow

• Every Monday, we have a one-on-one Zoom meeting to discuss our goals, whether you are meeting your goals, what went well, what did not go well, and so on.
• You would work directly with the CEO, Simon, who trusts you with your responsibility areas and empowers you to come up with and for you to find the solutions. In other words: this role has a lot of freedom for you to work in the way that you think is best for the company. Simon and the team do not micromanage and have no interest in doing so.
• You’re also responsible for maintaining the Github repository of the project you’re working on, committing/pushing/documenting your changes, commenting on your code, and writing SOPs or technical documentation (if necessary). It doesn’t have to be pages long and can be very short and concise. But, as a developer, it makes life so much easier if you can return to your code in the future without having to think too hard about what you did. This is also about being considerate of your teammates' time.
• There must be some overlap in our working hours so you can respond to urgent requests (if any) or chat with your manager or any of our departments on demand if they have an IT question. This means that some extra tasks may arise during the week.
• You might have a day where one of our team members needs something urgent and needs it done the same or the next day, which can be valuable to the company, or a major issue needs to be fixed ASAP, in which case you might have to drop what you're working on and work on that. If your main project's deadline cannot be met because of this (which is understandable), you should be able to communicate this on time.
• However, most of the time you are able to work on your main projects in solitary. We understand that developers need complete focus. You can also chat and ask questions in our Slack channels.