Senior Backend Software Engineer (PHP/Python) - Contractor at WP Media

WP Media, founded in 2014 in Lyon, France, is an equal opportunity employer with a distributed team of over 45 teammates located worldwide. We are the company behind successful WordPress plugins like WP Rocket and Imagify. WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin for WordPress, used by over 5,000,000 websites globally, designed to make sites load at lightning speed with just a few clicks. Imagify is our free image optimization service, including a free WordPress plugin, which has already optimized more than 19 billion images. You will join our remote, global Engineering team, with members spread across Canada, France, Egypt, Greece, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, and Romania. To facilitate this international teamwork, you will live or work in a time zone between UTC+3 to UTC-5. We offer flexible working hours and a remote work culture. As part of our collaborative and agile framework, we only require your availability around the time of the team’s daily standup meeting, currently at 2 PM CET. We value clear communication and encourage active participation from everyone. We are eager to discover which new country will be added to our distributed team map! WP Media is part of group.one, a leading European provider of online presence, cloud hosting, and digital marketing services. Over 2 million customers trust us with their online success. Our global team consists of 1,500+ employees operating from nearly 20 locations across 15 countries, with our headquarters in Sweden. Thanks to the support of our partners Cinven and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, we are steadily expanding the group's service portfolio and geographical footprint.

Development · Remote · Fully Remote

Senior Backend Software Engineer (PHP/Python) - Contractor

Please note that this is a contractor-only position, offered as a temporary contract for a maximum duration of 1 year.

Description

Are you a Senior Backend Software Engineer with experience in PHP and Python, who loves building outstanding user experiences, implementing new features, and thrives in a strong engineering culture? Are you looking for projects to lead and tackle with a get-it-done mindset? Does simplifying complexity excite you? Do you have a knack for teamwork with people from different backgrounds and skills? If you answered yes to these questions, we are confident this position will sound incredibly exciting to you. We are looking for a friendly person passionate about PHP and Python, web performance, and engineering excellence to join our WP Rocket Addons team! Keep reading for more details!

Become Our New Backend Software Engineer!

What you will be doing

You will be joining our WP Rocket Addons team, responsible for developing and maintaining most of WP Media’s services. This includes server-side features such as Remove Unused CSS and the Imagify optimization service, as well as our commercial platforms, internal CRM, e-commerce websites, and back-office tools that empower all our teams to provide the best experience to our users. In your role as a Senior Backend Software Engineer, your primary focus will be on designing, architecting, and building software to deliver the product & marketing vision to our users through iterative and agile product development and projects. You will actively collaborate with your team of experienced software engineers to design, implement, test, deliver, and maintain services that meet our quality and performance standards, adhering to our strong engineering culture. You will interact closely with the Product, Marketing, and Support teams to identify the best approaches for collaboratively building a delightful user experience. You will be reporting to the Engineering Manager leading the WP Rocket addons team. Previous experience with PHP and Python is required for this position. Knowledge of Node.js, Django, and/or WordPress is appreciated, but not mandatory. Here is a list describing the tasks involved in this position (do you happen to like making lists? So do we!):

• Contribute to continuously improving our services (backend, e-commerce, backoffice) to deliver the best user experience through our products.
• Scope, lead, and collaborate on technical solutions and specifications for user stories and EPICs in our backlog.
• Collaborate with your cross-functional Product & Engineering team in each sprint to pull in ready-to-build user stories and get each built, tested, and released.
• Review and test pull requests and collaborate with your peers to ensure our code meets standards, achieves the desired outcome, and does not cause side-effects.
• Seek opportunities to improve the quality of our services, make products run faster, be easier to maintain, and be more reliable, secure, robust, and scalable.
• Collaboratively contribute to our internal agentic AI setup, code libraries, process improvements, and functional and technical decisions.

During this journey, you will gain cross-training and growth opportunities by working with your fellow engineering teammates on internal projects, covering several languages and various technical stacks. You will join a team and a company with a strong engineering culture where continuous improvements, collaboration with peers, and autonomy are key values. Our engineering teams frequently meet to share their learnings and feedback and maintain public documentation of our best practices (for instance, check out our public engineering handbook!). We also regularly dedicate time to codebase maintenance, open-source contribution, and best-practice refinements: we believe having a great developer experience requires effort but leads to better products in the long run. We are embracing AI-driven development and continuously building and improving our internal agentic system to enhance our productivity and the quality of our products.

Requirements

Personal Traits

• Being Yourself: The WP Media team is diverse and composed of people from all over the world. Respect, collaboration, and inclusivity are some of our core values. Every day of work is an exciting opportunity to connect with fantastic people who will enrich your cultural and professional background.
• Passion and humbleness: You are a skilled, passionate, and humble software engineer who is friendly, collaborative, and supportive. Solving problems and building solutions that help people are the values that make your work special and rewarding.
• Consider how your work impacts others: At WP Media, one of our values is "user first": we do what is best for them, and we work to offer them an exceptional experience with our products. You consider how the code we build impacts them. You value personal growth and constructive feedback. People feel good around you because you love sharing what you know while continuously improving yourself, remaining thoughtful and flexible in your approach.
• Proficient knowledge of English: Empathetic and collaborative communication is key: you are comfortable writing, speaking, and listening in English with technical and non-technical teammates.

Work Experience

• Solid PHP & Python expertise: You will bring proven experience in building, improving, and maintaining PHP and Python solutions. You develop using modern techniques (for example, OOP, unit & integration testing, observability, AI assistance). You have experience in developing but also releasing and maintaining services used by tens of thousands of users.
• You own your developments: Framing issues and identifying solutions makes you thrive. You are not satisfied with simply expediting tickets and issues, but you want to own the projects and codebases you work on and actively take part in its evolution. You want to drive continuous improvement by enhancing embedded tests, best practices, and keeping the stack up to date.
• Experience with automated code validation & testing: You believe code should comply with the team's standards as well as best practices. You value automated code validation to perform pre-code reviews while reducing the load of the manual code review process. You have experience with automated testing, i.e. unit, integration, and maybe even end-to-end acceptance testing. You appreciate how granular tests prove that your code works as expected even in unexpected conditions. You are convinced that qualitative codebases and test suites are enablers of AI productivity gains.
• Love quality, AI-driven development and continuous improvement: Quality and continuous improvement drive you, and you apply this to your usage of AI. You know that quality means the code not only works but works as expected in many different environments and conditions. You insist on code being reliable, complete, robust, and stable. You are a builder and a collaborator, working with your teammates to continuously improve our agentic system, practices, processes, code, tools, and pipelines.

Do You Bring Even More to the Table?

Do you want to know a few other things we appreciate about our candidates? Don’t worry if you don’t have experience in any of these areas; we can teach you and learn together along the way!

• Expertise in Django, WordPress and/or Node.js: Most of the software you will work on is implemented using Django (Python) or WordPress (PHP). Some services are written in Node.js. Are you familiar with those frameworks/runtime environments? Great, you’ll be up to speed quickly! Otherwise, we will teach you.
• Not afraid of DevOps activities: Deploying and running products, services, and websites is as important as developing them. While we have a team dedicated to those activities, you will assist them as the expert of the services you developed. You might be familiar with Kubernetes, Chef, Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, and Kibana? If you don’t, don’t worry: We will teach you!

Do you want to know three other things we appreciate about our candidates?

• Previous remote job experience.
• Slack will be your virtual office, where all the life of the company takes place.
• If you are excited about providing technical assistance to our customers, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

What You Should Know About Our Company: WP Media

Founded in 2014 in the beautiful Lyon, France, WP Media is an equal opportunity employer with a distributed team of +45 teammates living around the world. WP Media is the French company behind successful WordPress plugins like WP Rocket and Imagify. WP Rocket is the premium caching plugin for WordPress used by +5,000,000 websites worldwide. Our plugin makes sites go at the speed of light in just a few clicks. Imagify is our free image optimization service, including a free WordPress plugin: we have already optimized more than 19,000,000,000 images! You will join our remote, global Engineering team, which is spread across Canada, France, Egypt, Greece, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, and Romania. To facilitate this international teamwork, you will live or work in a time zone between UTC+3 to UTC-5. We offer flexible working hours & a remote work culture. As part of our collaborative and agile framework, we only require that you are available around the time of the team’s daily standup meeting, currently at 2 PM CET. We value clear communication and encourage everyone to participate actively. We are eager to find out which new country will be added to our distributed team map! WP Media is part of group.one, a leading European provider of online presence, cloud hosting, and digital marketing services. Over 2 million customers trust us with their online success. Our global team consists of 1,500+ employees operating from nearly 20 locations across 15 countries, with our headquarters in Sweden. Thanks to the support of our partners Cinven and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, we are steadily expanding the group's service portfolio and geographical footprint.

Do We Share the Same Values?

• Mutual respect, collaboration, and inclusivity. These are the fundamental values that support our life as a team.
• Healthy balance between work and private life. We encourage our employees to enjoy their family and hobbies with flexible working hours and minimum vacation policy. There are no time cards to stamp, only customers to make happy and friendly teammates to work with! We care about the work you do, not about the hours you sit at your desk.
• We like to see each other in person whenever possible. Every year, we organize a trip with the whole team and spend a week of coworking and fun activities together. To give you an idea, so far we have traveled to Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Greece, and Serbia.

We are committed to an inclusive and safe environment, free from discrimination and harassment. We welcome talent in all its diversity. Your gender, background, age, beliefs, or personal story do not define your opportunities here-what matters to us is mutual respect, personal appreciation, and creating a workplace where motivation and collaboration thrive. We believe in supporting your personal and professional growth, recognizing you as both an individual and a valued team member. We want to continue to grow with you and why we look forward to getting to know you. Now that we've told you so much about us, it's your turn. Let us know why you would like to become our Senior Backend Software Engineer and why you think you are the person we are looking for. We can’t wait to receive your application!