WooCommerce/WordPress Developer

Thank you for your interest in this role. Unfortunately, we are no longer accepting applications, but please check back in with us here for opportunities in future.

WordPress/WooCommerce Engineering Role (Remote)

We are looking for a mid-level backend WooCommerce/WordPress developer to join our happy little crew. If you can see yourself doing the following, we’d love to hear from you:

• writing code for WooCommerce Subscriptions, which builds on WooCommerce and WordPress
• reviewing code written by other team members via pull requests
• occasionally writing unit tests for existing code and often writing unit tests for major new features
• committing, pushing, pulling with Git
• specifically, writing/reviewing new features and code to migrate the database storage and access to new, more scalable design

About you:

You are a kind hearted and good natured person, who is comfortable with self-directed work yet also happy to do that work as part of a team. If you are an extrovert, you will need to at least understand and have empathy for introverts, which make up the majority of our team.

Your technical skills are as follows:

If you have university degree in computer science or equivalent:

• 2+ years professional experience with PHP
• 2+ years professional experience with MySQL
• 2+ years experience working with Git and GitHub
• 1+ year professional experience with WordPress
• 1+ year experience writing unit tests with PHPUnit

If you do not have a degree:

• 4+ years experience with PHP
• 4+ years experience with MySQL
• 2+ years experience working with Git and GitHub
• 2+ years professional experience with WordPress development
• 1+ year experience writing unit tests with PHPUnit

On a personal level:

• you are diligent and have excellent attention to detail (providing links to work on GitHub can help us evaluate this)
• you are friendly, polite and kindhearted
• you are very intelligent (can be demonstrated through university GPA or less formal methods)
• you are collaborative rather than competitive
• you communicate clearly in English

You also have a positive mindset, and take pride in your work as you are committed to consistently doing the best job you can possible. You seek out opportunities for self-improvement as a path to personal and professional development. You are also comfortable with bad puns or at least with people who attempt to use them 😉

Although not necessary, we’d love it if you have the following (attributes):

• experience with Codeception
• fluency in a second (human) language
• professional experience with React.js
• professional experience with jQuery and Node.js
• professional experience working on a system using a microservices architecture
• involvement with your local WordPress community (meetups, WordCamps etc.)
• involvement with the global WooCommerce community (submitted patches to WooCommerce core or similar)
• evidence of a contributing nature (we’re a small team and everyone is responsible for the quality of the work we produce.)

About us

Prospress (pronounced “prosperous”) is a small but friendly bunch that loves eCommerce. We love building software that gives entrepreneurs the tools and freedom to do what they love! We think WooCommerce is the best thing to happen to the web since WordPress and are dedicated to strengthening the WooCommerce ecosystem through building software, content, and community on top of WooCommerce.

So far we’ve built WooCommerce Subscriptions, the largest and most popular commercial plugin in the official WooCommerce extension marketplace, which is used by thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. We also have a few smaller plugins, like One Page Checkout and free, open-source projects like Action Scheduler.

But that’s just the beginning. We have some new products in the works, as well as new versions of Subscriptions, and we’d love you to help us work on these ideas.

Prospress is a distributed company, which means our team is located across the globe, and everyone can work from home in their pyjamas if they wish (in our view, this is definitely one of the perks of the job). We don’t mind where you live, because we’re a distributed company. HQ (and we use that term loosely) is in San Francisco, but we also have people in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere in the US.

Despite being distributed globally, we have a great work environment online, with weekly video hangouts, chat communication via Slack, and a genuinely caring team. This role will give you great opportunities to learn new skills while consolidating existing strengths.

We are professional, but relaxed and apply a very loose agile methodology to our engineering workflow, with biweekly SCRUMs. All software development is managed through GitHub. All patches to our software go through code-review from at least one other team member, which means you’ll get feedback from other developers on every piece of work you complete. We expect that you will quickly be contributing to our software which will then ship to run live on thousands of websites within your first few weeks of joining us.

We offer some pretty neat benefits, including:

• a sliding leave policy (you start with four weeks per year and it grows to five weeks after you’ve been with us for five years)
• your own Professional Development fund to cover the cost of self-guided learning
• stock options, so that our company becomes your company
• medical insurance if you’re in the US
• fair pay and recognition – salary is negotiable based on experience
• autonomy and flexibility

A Day in the Life of Prospress Engineer

To give you an idea of a what it’s like to work with us, this is a brief summary of a day in the (working) life of a Prospress engineer.

9:00am: you arrive at the “office”, which may be a coworking space, cafe, or spare room, maybe while still in your pyjamas. You choose where you work best. You also choose when to start your day (so it might be 9am, it might be 5 am, it might be 12pm… it’s up to you).

9:01am: you review Slack messages from the rest of the Prospress team. These range from team members discussing technical issues with our software, to sharing links about interesting (and mostly relevant) news in WordPress, WooCommerce, eCommerce, Cryptocurrency, Security, AI or tangential fields, like Behavioural Economics.

9:15am: you open GitHub to find unassigned Issues with the highest priority and self-assign one to start working on, or perhaps check on the latest updates to a Pull Request from another team member you reviewed yesterday. You fire up your favourite tools for WordPress development and begin the day’s hacking. You choose what to work on most of the time and how you want to work. And that’s about where the typical day ends. The rest is entirely up to you.

You can take lunch where/when you want. You can end the day, or break it up however you need to in order to maximise your productivity. Everyone on our team is given autonomy in their day and tasks because we believe the best people know how to do their best work and will strive to do it when left alone. The only requirements we have are a fortnightly SCRUM for 1 hour, fortnightly team hangout for 1 hour, and a 4 week support rotation every few months to make sure you keep connected to our users.

We appreciate this isn’t the right environment for everyone. It requires a genuine desire and self-discipline to constantly strive to improve your work. It’s also not suited for extroverts who love a physical water cooler for chatting with colleagues (although we do have a virtual water cooler). For the right people, this freedom and autonomy will allow you to thrive.

If this sounds great to you, we’d love to have you apply for the role. The next section explains how to do that.

About the process

We know job applications are stressful, so we want to make this process as painless as possible (and maybe even fun and exciting!) This is how it’s going to go down:

Step 1: Submit your application by 20th October.

Step 2: We will contact only the shortlisted applicants via email within one month, inviting them to a quick 30 minute interview (via video call or chat).

Step 3: Based on the interview and the original applications, we will invite a number of the shortlisted candidates to take part in a three month trial.

Step 4: At the end of the trial, we will invite our chosen applicants to join a full team hangout (via video call).

Step 5: We’ll offer the position.

Here is some additional information about the process:

Q: I submitted an application but I didn’t hear anything back. What happened?

A: If you don’t hear from us, unfortunately, you didn’t get through to the shortlist this time.

Q: Is it a formal interview?

A: We have a number of structured questions, but are also quite an informal company. The goal of the interview is to get a sense for you as a person and for you to get a sense for us as a company. The questions are meant to act as an impetus for discussion that helps us both achieve that.

Q: What sort of questions will be asked?

A: There will be a few of the usual questions like “Why do you want to work with us?” and “What would you say is the best thing you’ve ever built?”; but we will also have a few that should be new to you. Any technical questions will be more philosophical than practical, like “What do you like about WordPress?” rather than “What is a hook in WordPress?”. The interview is more about you as a person – your application and the trial are to check your technical skills, so the interview is about finding people with the right attitude.

Q: Will it be a video or voice or text chat?

A: We can do whichever you prefer, please let us know if you have a preference, otherwise we will make a choice.

Q: Will everyone move on to the trial stage?

A: Unfortunately not. While we’d love to offer trials to everyone, not all of our shortlisted candidates will go through to a trial. We will let you know as soon as possible after the initial interview whether you have been selected for a trial.

Please, no recruiters or unsolicited offers.