PHP Software Engineer

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About the Company

The Motley Fool provides free and premium investment guidance to millions of individual investors around the world. The Motley Fool's purpose is to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. They help millions of people around the world achieve their financial goals every day. They believe in treating every dollar as an investment in the future you want to create. They believe that investing in great businesses, for the long term, is the most effective path to wealth. They strive to fulfill a purpose by truly serving every Fool, from their employees to the members of their community.

About the job

The Motley Fool is looking for a talented Senior-level PHP Developer to join our team on an independent contract basis 40 hours per week. We’re anticipating 6-12 months for this contract with the possibility of a permanent role down the line.

We will prioritize applications from candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Washington DC, Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin

Who are we?

We are The Motley Fool, a purpose-driven financial information and services firm with nearly 30 years of experience focused on making the world smarter, happier, and richer. But what does that even mean?! It means we’re helping Fools (always with a capital “F”) demystify the world of finance, beat the stock market, and achieve personal wealth and happiness through our products and services. The Motley Fool is firmly committed to diversity, inclusion, and equity. We are a motley group of overachievers that have built a culture of trust founded on Foolishness, fun, and a commitment to making the world smarter, happier and richer. However you identify or whatever winding road has led you to us, please don't hesitate to apply if the description above leaves you thinking, “Hey! I could do that!”

What does this team do?

Our mission on the Global Tech Team: Helping people in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom invest, better. We are the team that builds and maintains , and . We run our sites on WordPress Multisite and write a lot of custom code around customer acquisition, analytics, and product experience using modern PHP and React. We integrate with SaaS systems via APIs and also build systems to scale in AWS. We adopt AI into our day-to-day work to improve efficiency and integrate it into our products to provide better tools for our members.

What would you do in this role?

We are looking for a savvy, talented software engineer to join our team as a contractor. We live and breathe online, so we are constantly stepping up our site game. With your broad experience, you have solid, hands‑on work experience building beautiful, fast, and functional websites, and you enjoy thinking outside the box and collaborating with those around you. We are a highly motivated, highly valued, motley crew, each with unique perspectives we bring to the team, and we play a critical role in the success of the Fool’s brand across multiple teams.

Okay… but what does this role actually do?

Contribute to a large PHP 8 codebase focused around leveraging and extending WordPress Multisite as a CMS.

Work with TypeScript, React and other front‑end technologies (though this isn’t usually our primary focus).

Write clean and efficient code.

Collaborate with stakeholders and cross functional groups to drive action and build great, useful features.

Build consensus with the team for new technical approaches and ideas.

Learn, benefit and leverage generative AI systems.

Guide the development process from determining the scope, to implementing a solution, and then refining with stakeholder feedback before shipping to production.

Provide feedback on code via GitHub pull requests.

Keep abreast of new technologies and suggest improvements to the development process.

These are the must‑haves for this role:

• Strong background and understanding of extending WordPress via its pub/sub model as well as OOP principles and design patterns in PHP
• Familiarity with RESTful APIs and integrating third‑party services into WordPress
• Familiar with git and GitHub flows
• Experience with unit testing and integration testing methodologies
• Familiarity with composer and managing PHP dependencies
• Understanding of web security vulnerabilities and experience implementing security measures
• Experience with AWS (especially Lambda, SQS)
• Excellent analytical skills to troubleshoot and solve complex technical issues
• A degree in computer science or related field
• Experience with Next.js
• Familiarity with WP Engine
• Experience working in a PHP monorepo (monorepo-builder)
• A history of work on a large development project where you collaborated with other developers, designers, and product owners
• Experience maintaining an older codebase