Contractor: PHP Website Developer - Newsela

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 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 (such as Claude Code) are how this team builds, reviews, and operates.

Why You'll Love This Role

• Full Lifecycle Ownership: Takes a problem from request to shipped, monitored, and stable in production.
• Autonomy: Comfortable asking questions and shaping scope without heavy PM guidance.
• Proactive Risk Management: Raises issues early. Catches risks, design drift, and brittle patterns before they reach production—in your own work and in review. Doesn't wait to be asked.
• Team Player: Steps into incidents, jumps into a teammate's PR queue, and drives unowned problems when priorities shift.
• AI-Native Mindset: 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.
• Delivery Focus: Active in planning and grooming, pushes back on under-specified work, and 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 and architectural feedback, not just approvals.
• Serve as a first responder for production issues during working hours: triage, root cause, and preventive measure recommendations.
• Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation.
• Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning.

About You

• 7+ years of experience in website development using PHP and MySQL.
• Proven track record of building complex web applications with maintainable solutions that 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.
• Professional-level English proficiency (written and spoken) to communicate technical concepts clearly.
• Advanced understanding of modern web application architecture, web fundamentals, developer tooling, and unit testing.
• Experience integrating and working with REST APIs.
• Intermediate to advanced understanding of relational databases.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Laravel
• Experience with AWS

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.