Senior WordPress Maintenance & Deployment Engineer

What we're looking for

Must have

• 4+ years professional WordPress development including custom themes, ACF, and multilingual setups (Polylang/WPML)
• Deep hands-on Pantheon experience: dev/test/live workflow, multidev, Git mode vs SFTP mode, Autopilot, terminus CLI, and the platform's quirks (e.g., update-core hidden on test/live)
• WP Engine deployment and backup workflows
• Strong Git discipline: feature branches, clean merges, understanding why a branch 14 commits behind master is a red flag
• Front-end build pipelines: SCSS, gulp, npm — and the judgment to never commit compiled output without its source
• A documented QA habit: you can describe, step by step, what you check after a plugin update and why
• Clear written English; comfortable communicating directly with agency partners and, when needed, their clients
• Demonstrated fluency working alongside AI assistants (Claude, Copilot, or similar) in a real production workflow — and clear judgment about where AI output must be human-verified

What you'll do

Run monthly plugin, theme, and WP core updates across a large Pantheon/WP Engine roster using multidev and Autopilot branches — never directly on live

Take a manual backup before every live push, without exception, and verify restore points exist before touching production

Perform structured post-deployment QA on live (key templates, archive pages, plugin-dependent modules like Ajax Load More, Polylang, ACF-driven layouts) so breakage is caught by us, not the client

Know and track plugin-specific quirks per site (e.g., plugins that need deactivate/reactivate after core updates, incompatible importers that must be disabled before a core bump) and maintain that knowledge in a living runbook

Work exclusively through source: edit SCSS/JS sources and recompile via gulp — never patch minified files directly; keep branches synced with master and named after their feature

Respect content integrity: never pull databases down over environments carrying client content; never restore backups onto a live or test environment without confirming what will be lost

Deliver monthly maintenance reports on time, in the correct format and folders, with accurate hosting/backup details per site — reports must reflect what actually shipped to live

Triage urgent "site down" flags fast, communicate root cause honestly (including when it was our push), and close tickets only when the fix is verified on live

Use AI tooling (Claude, Claude Code, and similar) as a daily co-worker: drafting QA checklists, diffing changelogs for breaking changes before updates, generating regression test lists per site, summarizing incident post-mortems, and accelerating debugging — while personally verifying everything AI produces before it ships

Nice to have

• Shopify theme development (Liquid) and app ecosystem familiarity
• ManageWP or similar fleet-management tooling
• Security hygiene: Sucuri/Wordfence triage, malware cleanup, understanding why code that silently creates admin users must never reach a client repo
• Accessibility (WCAG) scanning and remediation basics
• PHP 8.x migration experience (typed errors, deprecations)
• Experience writing client-facing maintenance reports.

CreativeWorks runs multi-year maintenance retainers for agency partners managing 40+ WordPress and Shopify properties for enterprise and nonprofit clients. You will own the monthly maintenance lifecycle end to end: plugin/core updates, deployments, post-push QA, backups, client reporting, and urgent break/fix response.

This is not a "click update and move on" role. Our sites live on Pantheon and WP Engine with real Git workflows, compiled SCSS pipelines, and clients who notice within 30 minutes when something breaks. We need someone whose deployment discipline is a reflex, not a checklist.