Now Hiring: Staff Software Engineer (WordPress), Open Source Team

About Us

Gatsby is a remote-first, community-focused team working to build a high-performance, fun to use, accessible, and astonishingly flexible presentation layer for any data source. Our core values include transparency (our work is public most of the time); creating a safe, high-trust team; building incredible developer experiences; maintaining a healthy working environment; and helping deliver web experiences that feel amazing to use on every device and connection type.

Details of the Role

• Type of Work: Full-time employee
• Location: Remote (preference for UTC-8 to UTC+4)
• Engineering Level: Staff (see our Engineering Levels Guide)

Why we’re hiring

Gatsby loves WordPress. Not only is Gatsby sponsoring WordCamp US, but we recently invested in making WPGraphQL the best possible GraphQL API for WordPress. We need help improving the health and stability of WPGraphQL, creating and evaluating automation processes, making WPGraphQL more approachable to outside contributors, and when relevant deepening the integration with Gatsby. We also need help keeping up with the WPGraphQL community, guiding developers to answers, and just generally being a positive presence in the open source community.

Why this is interesting

Tens of thousands of users use Gatsby to build beautiful, performant sites every month.

A third of the web runs on WordPress. WPGraphQL used with Gatsby has the potential to greatly impact the future of the web.

Our open source team is shaping the future of web; bringing React, Node.js and GraphQL to the content web; setting new standards for website performance; and unifying the “content mesh” in integrating data sources.

What you’ll do on a day-to-day basis

Depending on the day, you’ll:

• Help guide architectural decisions. WPGraphQL turns WordPress into an “application data graph”. This is no small task and requires detailed discussions and thought exercises. From WPGraphQL Subscriptions to Schema Design principles, the future of WPGraphQL is discussed and planned in our public RFCs and issues. You’ll be helping drive these conversations and processes, guiding WPGraphQL toward the best possible solutions.
• Contribute to deep, meaningful refactors and feature releases. WPGraphQL and Gatsby are both relatively complex codebases. Meaningful features may often require a couple weeks to a month of dedicated, careful work. This includes both Gatsby and the core WPGraphQL plugin, but also for the many WPGraphQL Extensions we maintain, including WPGraphiQL, WPGraphQL JWT Authentication, WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields, and others.
• Collaborate with the community. Many small as well as meaningful fixes and features have been contributed by the community. Your role as a Core team maintainer is to draw the best out of the community — to inspire those across the world to create and contribute through your reviews of their issues and pull requests, and to mentor WordPress plugin developers to create WPGraphQL support for their own plugins. We host “Lunch & Learn” sessions with WordPress agencies to familiarize engineers with WPGraphQL and Gatsby, and we encourage speaking and networking at conferences.
• Reduce friction. A large amount of the work for WPGraphQL is about reducing friction and making WPGraphQL easier to use. This might involve careful API design, identifying and fixing top bugs, building example applications to demo the use of WPGraphQL, creating easier-to-use error messages, and writing documentation and blog posts about features you ship (see “Why we Write” for our philosophy on writing.)
• Experiment and play. Great, unexpected features and heisenbug fixes on the team have come from a number of sources — relentlessly methodical processes of elimination, free-flowing team collaboration, inspiration by adjacent libraries and projects, and difficult-to-explain individual strokes of brilliance. Whatever your preferred style is for creating new things that others might not have thought of, you’ll find a welcome home on the Gatsby core team.

Read our ”Day in the Life of a Core [Open Source] Maintainer” blog post for a deeper look!

Experience you should have

• Expertise in the WordPress ecosystem. WPGraphQL is ambitiously turning WordPress into an application data graph. This requires intimate familiarity with WordPress core, how data is handled in the CMS and common uses of WordPress in the ecosystem.
• Expertise in the modern JavaScript ecosystem. Gatsby is built on the shoulders of giants, making use of technologies like Node.js, GraphQL, React, webpack, and Babel.
• Ability to dive into complex problems. You should be able to quickly assess, understand, and iterate upon aspects of our codebase.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills. As part of our open source team, you’d both directly and indirectly interface with community members. Clear communication is fundamental in creating intuitive and compelling resources.
• Ready and willing to ask and answer questions. If you’re comfortable saying you’re unsure, asking for help, and reaching out to assist others, you’ll be an incredible addition to our team. Our team thrives because of continuous learning.

Experience it would be nice if you had, but isn’t required

• You’ve maintained an active repository before. Maybe you’ve helped maintain a popular open source repo, or maybe you’ve worked on internal repos that saw contributions from multiple teams. Previous experience with highly active repo workflows is a definite plus for this role.
• You have experience with modern build tools such as Webpack, Buck, or Bazel. Gatsby’s architecture is in many ways inspired by these tools, and you’ll need to recognise when to incorporate ideas from them into Gatsby.
• You have experience with Unit/Integration testing for WordPress. WPGraphQL uses Codeception and PHPUnit to test features. Previous experience with writing tests for PHP codebases will go a long way.

The best parts of this job

• You’ll be at the cutting edge of website development — working on one of the fastest-growing site building frameworks on the market, digging into both WPGraphQL and Gatsby’s innovatively architected codebase and build system, using modern tools such as Node, React, and GraphQL.
• You’ll be part of an active, open, friendly community of developers that are really excited about building high-performance, fun-to-use websites.
• You’ll be working in a safe, open environment of talented engineers who have a broad range of experience.
• Your role will be key to making Gatsby the next way to build on the web — and a technology that enables the next billion internet users.

The worst parts of this job

• In open source, you’re faced with a nonstop stream of bug reports and support requests.That means you need to develop an intuition of when to just ignore something and when to dig in further.
• WPGraphQL is dependent on WordPress, a 15 year old codebase. Building a modern API for an old codebase can be challenging in painful ways.
• Gatsby is a large, intricate codebase with 50k+ lines of code in the open source package and 300k+ lines of code in maintained plugins. You may bang your head against the wall at times, and then write 10-15 tests to assist future you.
• The work you would be doing is somewhat unique and idiosyncratic. You probably have not had a similar role before.

Benefits for you

• 3 months of paid parental leave covering both adoption and foster placement
• Unlimited vacation policy, with a minimum of 15 days paid vacation time
• Amazing health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family (US only)
• Skip the commute with remote work
• Fly to cool locations 3x/year for company-wide meetups
• Stock options in a fast-growing startup
• Gatsby Sabbatical: 4 weeks paid vacation after 4 years tenure

Our Hiring Process

Gatsby is an equal opportunity employer. We eagerly seek applicants of diverse backgrounds and hire without regard to race, color, gender identity, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, physical abilities (or disability), age, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Cultivating inclusivity and diversity is a top priority.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. Gatsby does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Gatsby.