Job Summary

Frontend and backend development for WordPress themes and plugins. Need to be able to think critically about the user experience and product workflows and how these are reflected across various interfaces, generating concepts for product features and improvements, and ultimately building out the underlying tools that power these design decisions.

Must also be able to formulate, iterate on, and ultimately develop various design systems in order to build tools that empower users to build their own websites. You will be involved with decisions related to how to enable the necessary customization power users want, while not overwhelming them with features and functions. This involves abstracting out more complicated site-building functions and trying to find creative and engaging ways to present that to our users.

You will also work with third-party designers on sections of our tooling and resources (e.g. custom iconography, mockup ideas, et cetera). You will need an intuitive feel for a consistent design for features and workflows that will also line up with the ideas of outside designers, occasionally helping them to round out certain areas to allow for more efficient use of time or functions.

You will also work a lot on building out the demo content that accompanies our products, which includes making layout templates, element presets, full site demos, et cetera.

Essential characteristics of this job:
- Being a self-starter
- Able to wear many hats
- Having an understanding of where things are and a vision for where they are going
- Primarily dealing with product development
- Conceptualizing and iterating on product features and improvements
- Designing and developing systems for yourself and users
- Working on a team and integrating feedback into solutions

Required skills and experience:
- HTML
- A desire for efficient, well laid-out, and flexible markup
- Use of modern, semantic markup
- A working knowledge of what goes into creating accessible applications for users with disabilities (it's fine if you're not as familiar with these accessibility aspects of web development when starting out as we can assist in learning more about this)
- ARIA
- Element roles
- How attributes like `aria-selected`, `aria-expanded`, and `aria-hidden` work are helpful
- CSS
- Know what it takes to write and maintain orderly, concise, and modular styles that can scale with you as your projects grow
- A keen eye for detail, from the smallest amount of `letter-spacing` to trying to match the precise shade of a color
- Extremely comfortable with responsive design and thinking through all of the considerations that come with that
- An expert understanding of modern layout techniques including flexbox, grid systems, et cetera
- A desire to always be learning about new features that are on the cusp of widespread adoption (e.g. CSS grid, CSS custom properties, et cetera) and how you can think ahead to potentially work those technologies into product development
- Style for RTL language support
- Comfort in hand-coding designs and concepts from scratch (we don't use any frameworks like Bootstrap, everything is bespoke)
- We use Sass (`.scss` syntax) to compile all of our project styles
- JavaScript
- You're comfortable working with vanilla JavaScript, meaning you don't necessarily need jQuery to accomplish what you're looking to do, that being said
- we do use jQuery throughout our projects along with various other third-party libraries, so familiarity in integrating these into your workflow is important
- As our site-builder is built in Ember, working knowledge of that is helpful but not required (the core concentration of JavaScript knowledge for this position centers around front-end interactivity and building systems for those components and pieces to all work together fluidly for our users, it does not have as much to do with building out the application level code that manages all of that)
- PHP
- Comfort in working with PHP as our core products center around WordPress
- A firm understanding of WordPress, including but not limited to:
- The templating system
- Child themes
- Actions
- Filters
- Custom post types
- WordPress' internal APIs, including the Settings API
- The Customizer
- Building plugins
- We integrate with various third-party plugins such as WooCommerce in different ways, so being comfortable working with and building features on top of an interconnected codebase is a must
- Tooling
- git
- npm
- Webpack
- Design
- Being comfortable with apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch. At times graphics for our sales pages, customer portal, products, or demos need to be mocked up or created for all sorts of different applications.

This job is 100% telecommuting. You will work out of your own home. The hours will be US day time hours, but may occasionally require other hours as appropriate for completing projects and working with a world-wide audience. We have occasional meetups of the entire team which you will need to travel to. These are usually no more than twice a year.

If you are interested, please send an email to info@theme.co. The subject line should be: Design Oriented Developer and please include your answers to these questions:

- General
- What excites or interests you most in the world of web development right now?
- If you could master one technology this year, what would it be?
- Can you describe your workflow when you create a web page?
- Tabs or spaces?
- HTML & CSS
- Explain how a browser determines what elements match a CSS selector
- Is there any reason you would want to use `translate()` instead of relative positioning, or vice versa? And why?
- What kind of things might you be considerate of when designing or developing for websites that require multilingual support?
- JavaScript
- Why is it, in general, a good idea to leave the global scope of a website as-is and never touch it?
- Explain hoisting
- Explain why the following doesn't work as an IIFE and what must you change to get it to work?
- `function foo(){ }();`
- WordPress
- What is the difference between actions and filters in WordPress?
- What is the difference between `get_option()` and `get_theme_mod()`?