Lead Software Engineer - Digital Platforms
Working lead full-stack engineer who owns architecture, CI/CD, security patching, and technical strategy for a ~140-site WordPress and Drupal web ecosystem, while staying hands-on building and mentoring engineers. Core stack: WordPress, Drupal, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript (Next.js/React).
- Compensation
- $165K–$195K / yr
- Location
- Arlington, VA
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Lead
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead, staff engineer, or engineering lead
- Track record of remaining heavily hands-on while leading (not a management role with occasional coding)
- Strength in architecture and systems thinking across an ecosystem of applications
- Sound technical judgment under pressure; ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers, including senior individual contributors
- Supervisory experience, including directly managing engineers, setting performance expectations, and conducting reviews
- Reliable estimation and the habit of surfacing risks, dependencies, and sequencing needs early
- Comfort participating in product discovery and challenging requests respectfully
- Deep, current WordPress experience: custom themes and plugins, Gutenberg, Advanced Custom Fields, WP-CLI, multisite or large multi-site portfolios
- Deep, current Drupal experience: custom modules and themes, Drupal 10+, entity and configuration management, Views, Drush, Composer-based builds, headless/decoupled Drupal via JSON:API or GraphQL
- Strong modern PHP, including object-oriented design and Composer
- SQL experience, including query performance work
- Front-end JavaScript experience (Next.js, React, etc.) and modern build tooling
- Experience owning hosting, deployment pipelines, and environment configuration for production web platforms
Nice to have
- Upsun, AWS, and Cloudflare or comparable CDN experience
- Experience consolidating, migrating, or reducing a site portfolio
- Accessibility experience to WCAG 2.2 AA
- Experience working with marketing and campaign teams on tight timelines
- Track record of using AI-enabled tools and practices to accelerate work
Full description
Stand Together is a philanthropic community that helps America’s boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of our country’s biggest problems, from education to the economy, broken communities, and toxic division, among dozens of other pressing issues. We provide our partners with access to resources including funding, thought leadership, a network of peers, and a playbook for applying proven principles to transform lives and society.
As the Lead Full-Stack Software Engineer, you will provide the technical leadership for a large and complex web ecosystem, including approximately 140 WordPress sites supporting our Grassroots workstream as well as our Drupal properties. This is a working leadership role. You will stay hands-on in the code while owning technical strategy, architecture, engineering standards, technical discovery and estimation, mentoring, work allocation, and the partnership with Product and stakeholders.
You will provide technical leadership across both our WordPress and Drupal platforms, beginning with the Grassroots workstream and extending across additional workstreams and technology stacks over time.
How You Will Contribute
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Own architecture across the web ecosystem, including hosting and infrastructure strategy, integrations, and long-term platform direction.
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Stay hands-on. A meaningful share of your time is spent building, reviewing, and debugging alongside the engineers you lead.
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Own deployment and release processes, CI/CD, and automation, including plugin and dependency update automation.
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Own plugin, dependency, and security management across the portfolio, and set the patching and remediation cadence.
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Establish engineering and QA standards in partnership with our SDET team.
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Lead technical discovery and estimation, and give Product credible estimates, dependencies, risks, and technical context they can prioritize against.
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Participate in Product discovery where technical assessment is required, while Product retains responsibility for business prioritization.
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Manage stakeholder expectations and appropriately challenge requests, including saying when a commitment is not realistic and what the alternative is.
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Improve the triage, allocation, and sequencing of engineering work across the workstream.
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Mentor and develop engineers, and reduce key-person dependencies through documentation, knowledge sharing, and deliberate coverage.