Contractor: PHP Website Developer

We are hiring a Contract PHP Website Developer to work on GenerationGenius.com. You will refine and break bodies of work into small and iterative deliverables, guide the team in setting achievable sprint goals and will organize sprints to ensure work is delivered with a high degree of quality and in a timely manner. As a member of the Technology team, you will partner closely with Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design to refine ambiguous goals into clearly defined, iterative work items. We work AI-native. Coding agents (Claude Code) are how this team builds, reviews, and operates.

Why You'll Love This Role: 

• Someone who owns the full lifecycle. Takes a problem from request to shipped, monitored, and stable in production. 
• Comfortable asking questions and shaping scope without heavy PM guidance.
• Raises issues early. Catches risks, design drift, and brittle patterns before they reach production - in their own work and in review. Doesn't wait to be asked.
• Picks up slack outside their lane. Steps into incidents, jumps into a teammate's PR queue, and drives an unowned problem when priorities shift.
• Builds in the AI-native space with discernment. Uses agents as a daily driver, learns their failure modes, and pushes the team's practice forward - not just their own.
• Drives delivery. Active in planning and grooming, pushes back on under-specified work, communicates trade-offs clearly to engineering and product partners.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Ship full-stack features with measurable product impact.
• Provide substantive code review, architectural feedback, not just approvals.
• Serve as a first responder for production issues (within working hours): triage, root cause, and preventive measures recommendations.
• Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation that lives where work happens.
• Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning.

About You:

• You have 7+ years of experience in website development using PHP and MySQL. 
• You have built complex web applications with maintainable solutions that work and call various services and APIs. 
• Advanced knowledge of custom Wordpress development, including data modeling and infrastructure. 
• Advanced knowledge and ability to leverage semantic HTML, responsive CSS, and modern design patterns to meet your team’s goals. 
• You will be able to communicate technical concepts and processes in English with at least a professional level of proficiency
• Experience with Laravel is a plus
• Experience with AWS is a plus 
• Advanced understanding of modern web app architecture and web fundamentals. 
• Intermediate to advanced understanding of developer tooling and unit test writing. 
• Experience with incorporating and working with REST API’s. 
• Intermediate to advanced understanding of relational databases. 
• On top of your technical skills, you are excited to work in a collaborative and inclusive environment that supports continued improvement through code reviews and feedback. 
• You take pride in your ability to identify missing requirements early in the development cycle, create and maintain performant and scalable backend systems, write resilient and testable code, and deliver on sprint commitments.

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Why you’ll love working at Newsela:

• Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

About Newsela:

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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