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.DescriptionAre 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 to tackle with a get-it-done mindset? Does making complexity simple 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 sure this position will sound super exciting to you. 🤩We are looking for a friendly person in love with 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 doingYou will be joining our WP Rocket Addons team, in charge of developing and maintaining most of WP Media’s services, including server-side features such as Remove Unsued CSS and the Imagify optimization service, as well as our commercial platforms including internal CRM and e-commerce websites, and back-office tools that empower all our teams to provide the best experience to our users.In your job as a Senior Backend Software Engineer, your primary focus will be on designing, architecting, and building the 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 according to our strong engineering culture. You will interact closely with the Product, Marketing, and Support teams to identify the best approaches to build a delightful user experience together. ou 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 get 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 ourpublic 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 improve our productivity and the quality of our products.RequirementsPersonal TraitsBeing 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 (more on this below). Every day of work is an exciting opportunity to get in touch 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 wh