Technical Lead – PHP, WordPress Developer
Washington, DC
Must possess either an active or interim Secret Clearance
Talent Orchard LLC, a Women-Owned Workforce Solutions Company has an exciting opportunity for an experienced technical lead with deep experience in PHP/WordPress development to lead a small team of developers responsible for maintaining one of the most significant websites for the US Government with a global presence.
This is not the type of opportunity that comes along very often!
The Technical Lead will manage a team of 3 developers and need to be both the ultimate technical SME for all things related to the maintaining and enhancing of capabilities on a globally visited web presence, but also to be the direct interface between the team and the government client. This is a role requiring both technical excellence and consultative skills of the highest order. It is a career-defining project for the right individual.
Working in an agile environment the Technical Lead will not only develop solutions but be a servant leader to mid-level developers and junior developers. This person will review client requests and break the work out into technical design in support of the writing and assigning of epics and user stories. The support under this Task area involves requirements for developing, integrating and leveraging, through user research, agile methodologies, application program interfaces plugins, scripts and other software tools that support the Mission Website Platform, and other IIP WordPress sites.
The Technical Lead developer will provide demos to the client and help the client develop the product backlog that maximizes the web site. In addition, they will be responsible for supporting the local AWS and Bitbucket environments in alignment with standards provided by the client. The Lead will work closely with the customer and other stakeholders on this effort and will serve as the focal point of contact to all involved. This will serve as the highest level of technical support and escalation from the development team.
The Lead PHP/WordPress Developer will oversee and provide guidance to the team to the following task areas:
Integrate third-party application program interfaces (APIs); CRM and other third-party applications and databases.
Engage with the open-source GitHub community; use open-source software, and publish to open-source communities.
Incorporate responsive design and follow an iterative and agile development model with sprints and a regular release cycle to support the continual development of web technologies. This will include the ability to provide work estimates for sprint management purposes.
Coordinate with the Government Product Owner and the O&M Team in drafting a formal release process.
Leverage and develop APIs, plugins, and scripts as needed, to interface with internal applications, social platforms, and third-party services. Make existing high-value data and content available through web APIs.
Develop centrally managed functionality to minimize the need for customization and manipulation of federated web properties. While collaboratively working with infrastructure support vendors to maintain and enhance application security, stability, and scalability;
Repurpose and build custom objects and custom assets that modify the functionality, look and feel of existing platforms.
Conduct demonstrations as needed to facilitate Department trainers in maintaining media platform functionality and ultimately training the end-user. This will include the ability to draft plain language descriptions of new functionality and system upgrades, to be edited and published as release notes; document the architecture, design, interfaces, APIs, and algorithms of all developed code, and draft Standard Operating Procedures and Standard Installation Procedures.
Evaluate and modify code and functionality in response to 508 evaluations and reports, ensuring digital platform compliance with Section 508 requirements; and conceive and develop functionality changes to improve the usability and user experience of web properties. In addition design, build, test, and deploy new site templates, layouts, and sections, as necessary, based on user testing.
Conduct user testing and research of functionality and features, to include remote and in-person testing and to gain insights into our audiences, using tools that include: focus groups, interviews, card sorting, personas, surveys, task analysis, journey mapping, prototyping, design thinking frameworks, not limited to but including methods outlined by methods.18f.gov;
Provide Information Architecture services that follow industry standards for creating, storing, accessing and presenting information, and result in the production of intuitive search, labeling, and navigation systems.
Create templates and guidance for long-term assessment of user experience across the various lifecycles of the digital platforms that may be replicated and used across multiple sites for various audiences.
Assess user and customer experience using analytics software tools including but not limited to Hot Jar, Usability Hub, Crazy Egg, and other A/B testing software as recommended.
Develop and adhere to a QA testing plan for all new code before deployment.
To complete these tasks you are likely to have experience with many of the following products and services;
WordPress, Various WordPress plugins, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, Sharepoint, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, Git Repository, BitBucket, DigitalGov Search, Bing Webmaster Tools, LDAP directory service, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), Javascript (especially front end), Python, .NET, Oracle, Django, PostgreSQL, Celery, AngularJS, RabbitMQ, MariaDB, Node JS, Jenkins, Ansible, Composer, Gulp, Babel
AWS experience is highly preferred to include working with services to include: ELBs, EC2, Autoscale Groups, S3 Buckets, Glacier, EFS, RDS Instances, Cloudwatch metrics, SQS Queues, Anti-Virus Management Server, SES, IAM, CloudTrail, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, VPC, ELB, Elasticsearch, ElastiCache, ElasticIP, API-Gateway, Lambda, Step Function, Cognito, Elastic Transcoder, Media Convert, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Certificate Management, Kinesis, Route 53, Subnet, Network ACL, Security groups, Gateways, AMI.
As this task requires engagement with senior government clients it is essential the Lead displays, strong emotional intelligence to create a positive work environment and professionalism in a fast-paced environment. Strong consulting skills to ensure client advocacy with the goal of becoming a trusted advisor. Ability to translate a symptom reported by the client to a technical solution and convey any impacts/trade-offs to the client. Also, translate that analysis into user stories for assignment and tracking.
Core education and experience requirements are;
Bachelor’s degree required, Master’s preferred
Minimum of fifteen (15) years’ relevant experience required with DoS, DoD, the IC, or other Federal government agencies.
Minimum of interim Secret Security clearance is required for this position
Established in 2010, Talent Orchard has an exceptional reputation, providing staffing solutions to time-sensitive, talent scarcity issues to deliver better talent management ROI. Our specialty lies in the critical area of program talent acquisition and resource management, not in one narrow skillset, but across many areas of technical and functional delivery. To learn more about our other exciting opportunities, visit our Jobs Page at www.talentorchard.com.