Currently going from strength to strength, with new clients and growing existing ones, we are looking to hire a full-time WordPress developer to join our team.

 

A little bit about us

Founded in 2011, CookiesHQ is a growing software development consultancy in Bristol, UK. Our team consists of back end and front end developers, a UI designer, three project managers, a head of marketing as well as the two founders.

Since 2011 we’ve grown organically by treating our staff and client with the highest respect, openness and standards. This is how we’ve built a strong customer base who have been growing with us for many years.

Early on, we decided to offer everyone working at CookiesHQ the opportunity to work from any location they choose, as a one-off or on a regular basis, whether it’s the office, home, their favourite coffee shop or a different country.

As a result, we now have a team that is geographically spread but well equipped to collaborate.

We’re very keen on self-development and work-life balance, so you will get dedicated self-improvement time and won’t be asked or expected to work nights or weekends. Most people work from 9.30am to around 6pm and then catch some rest or enjoy time with their families.

 

 

How do we work?

We work on projects in ‘pods’, i.e. teams within the team. A pod is usually made of a project manager, a designer, a lead back-end developer and a lead front-end developer. Additional developers join the project if and when needed.

We usually work in sprints and tend not to split time between projects. In other words, most of the time, you will be working on one project at any one time to focus your efforts and avoid the cost of switching from one project to another too often.

We also give our team a great sense of ownership for each project as well as the opportunity to meet the clients, participate in the planning meetings and have a direct channel of communication if and when necessary (especially for more technical projects or for projects where we collaborate directly with the CTO of the client company). This allows you to understand the context of the projects that you work on and make rational decisions based on the business use cases.

Our stack

For most projects, you will either work on a Ruby on Rails or WordPress environment. We use Ruby on Rails as our base to develop and scale products for most of our startups, and, sometimes, are doing consultative and performance work on large WordPress websites.

All our recent apps use Webpack inside Rails for both CSS and JavaScript.

We believe in a web that is accessible and that mostly relies on server-rendered pages, using CSS to make them pretty and JavaScript to enhance the user experience.

We’re not against ReactJS or VueJS, but we like to take an iterative approach on our JavaScript and only bring heavy libraries when they help us solve problems rather than use them as a default.

Here is a larger view of our stack:

• Ruby on Rails
• Webpacker
• SASS
• Vanilla JS
• Some node.js / EmberJS projects
• Heroku for a lot of our deployments
• Amazon S3 and Cloudfront
• Some Linode servers
• Capistrano and Ansible
• WordPress

 

A little bit about you and the role

We are looking for a mid-level WordPress developer that would join us to support some of our existing clients. Someone who can quickly grasp different types of projects, who can communicate well with teammates, face to face and remotely, is productive, reliable and pragmatic.

You would be working on some relatively large WordPress projects, that are constantly scaling, in needs or new functionality as well as some new website prototypes for new clients.

This role is a full-time role, based either in Bristol or remotely within a 2-hour timezone of the UK.

The role:

• Write clean, maintainable and tested code
• Work with a full-stack development team to build and maintain a WordPress based website.
• Follow best practices (test-driven development, continuous integration, refactoring and code standards)
• We have a strong front end team that can support you, and the role would, here require more PHP/WordPress backend knowledge.
• The role would suit particularly someone with the required WordPress experience but with an eventual desire to be trained and learned in Ruby on Rails.

Required skills and experience:

• at least 2 years of experience in programming.
• accessibility-focussed.
• good understanding of WordPress internals, ACF, WP CLI.
• good understanding of developing custom WordPress plugins, MySQL and performance optimisation.
• Some level of DevOps desirable.
• cloud computing platforms such as AWS
• Git, Github and Git flow

Salary and benefits:

• £25,000 to £35,000 depending on experience
• flexible working – core working hours are 9am to 5.30pm
• 25 days holidays + bank holidays. Extra days earned after the first 2 years.
• 5% employer pension contributions
• life insurance
• half a day a week dedicated to learning and development

 

How to apply and what to expect

To apply, please send your CV and any relevant information to Nicolas, our CTO (email: [email protected]).

In your first email, please explain your current experience and why you would be a great addition to our team.

Following your email, we will contact you for a first interview, usually in the presence of Nic (CTO) and Nathalie (MD). Here we will talk about you, your background, your aspirations.

If you are successful, then we will then set a day where we will aim for you to pair with one of our developers. This will give us the opportunity to test your technical skills and you the ability to ask questions directly to the team.

After those two rounds, we should have a pretty good idea of whether or not you would be a good fit for our team, and we should be ready to give a final answer.