WordPress Theme Engineers (Front-end)

We are looking for a Front End Engineer who is comfortable developing WordPress themes. Prior WordPress theme development experience is a must.

Since WordPress themes traditionally are developed with core PHP as a templating language, you should be comfortable with basic PHP.
This is a completely remote full-time position. You can apply from anywhere in the world.

Key Responsibilities

• You will be responsible for developing performant, responsive and accessible WordPress themes. In most cases you will get designs in Figma, Photoshop or similar design software that you need to directly convert into WordPress themes.
• Quite frequently, the designs you need to work on will be coming from external design agencies. These external designers may or may not be aware of WordPress intricacies, hence there is a high chance that those designs will require some adjustment to achieve a fine-balance between “pixel perfect” implementation as compared to hacking WordPress to the point where future maintenance becomes a nightmare. It will be your responsibility to achieve this balance.
• As a frontend-heavy engineer, we do not expect you to know PHP at an advanced level but it is expected that you are comfortable with basic PHP and can use WordPress core APIs created for theme developers. Basically any PHP code that by convention should be part of the theme will be your responsibility. While the line is blurred as to what should go in theme vs plugin, at rtCamp, we like to keep themes simple. So there will be much less PHP work to do during theme development.
• Optionally, if you are interested, we will give you the opportunity to build decoupled WordPress projects using WordPress REST API/GraphQL as a backend. In those cases, somebody else will develop custom API endpoints. You will need to have some React/Next.js skills to work on such decoupled projects for which required help will be provided.

Must Haves

The following items, as the heading suggests, are must-haves in their entirety. If you are unable to meet anyone from the below list, please upskill yourself and then revisit this page. rtCamp is always hiring.

• CSS — The single most important skill for this job is CSS. While you are free to use preprocessors such as SASS, very good knowledge of CSS internals is a must have.
• JS — The next important thing is core JavaScript (ES6/ESNext). jQuery is ok to use in production for simple themes, but knowledge of core JavaScript is a must. Some experience with front-end development tools such as Webpack, Babel, and npm is good to have.
• PHP — Basic comfort with PHP programming language. If you have developed a complete WordPress theme yourself before, then you already know enough.
• WordPress — Some WordPress core knowledge, such as template hierarchy, the loop, customizer API, and settings API. Also, some experience in writing CSS for the WordPress Gutenberg block editor. All themes we ship are required to have editor’s look and feel match front-end designs. Even when clients don’t ask for it or designers don’t design for it.

Good to Have

As the heading suggests, the items below are optional. But if you know any of them, make sure to highlight them in your job application. These will expedite your application.

• Gutenberg block development skills
• WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE)/Block-Based theme experience
• Web accessibility best practices
• React.js skills
• Comfort with command-line interface