Employment Type: Permanent Staff (EHRA NF)

Vacancy ID: NF0008435

Salary Range: 74,500 - 93,000

Position Summary/Description:

This position is a 100% remote work arrangement, consistent with System Office policy. UNC Chapel Hill employees are generally required to reside in North Carolina, within a reasonable commuting distance of their assigned duty station.

ITS Digital Services is UNC Chapel Hill’s in-house web and mobile team. We offer central WordPress-based web development and hosting, along with web design, UX/UI, and development services for campus units looking to revamp their web presence. The Digital Services team regularly acts as an in-house web development team, charging for website development projects.

The Senior Web Developer and Platform Engineer is a key member of this team, responsible for the end-to-end development and maintenance of our web hosting platform, hosted websites, and supported web applications. This full-stack development role involves designing, architecting, testing, administering, and monitoring the performance and security of the University’s web hosting platform. Key responsibilities include:

• Ensure all web products adhere to UNC policies, including privacy, accessibility, and security.

• Develop and build templates, custom WordPress themes, plugins, and other related web products for use by the campus community.

• Manage routine updates to plugins, themes, and WordPress core.

• Tackle middleware-related tasks such as optimizing and updating databases, caching mechanisms, and CDN configurations.

• Continuously refactor code to ensure performance and security best practices are followed.

• Monitor web transactions, both internal and external, for performance and security; prevent DDoS attempts, and block IPs at the CDN level.

• Maintain and renew SSL certificates.

• Manage advanced build tools such as NPM , Webpack, and WordPress scripts.

• Document tech stacks and major outages.

• Monitor and lead development efforts, working with Emergency Management to ensure Alert Carolina emergency management feeds are functional and consistently improved.

• Update development environments, set up performance monitoring, and continuously analyze access logs and error logs to maintain optimal performance.

• Participate in CAB meetings with knowledge of change management methodologies.

• Manage continuous integration and source control.

• Maintain and ensure proper backups are performed for all centralized WordPress sites.

With oversight of over 5,000 hosted campus websites and applications, including mission-critical sites, the Senior Web Developer and Platform Engineer collaborates closely with technical teams and staff to integrate infrastructure layers and ensure seamless performance. They will address complex technical issues and translate enterprise-level requirements and policies into actionable technical solutions and web architecture plans.

Additionally, this position serves as a lead web developer for the Digital Services team. Responsibilities include creating UNC -branded website templates, themes, plugins, and other web products for the UNC community, emphasizing accessibility and usability. These web products will offer a wide range of options for use by web professionals at UNC . The Senior Web Developer and Platform Engineer will also mentor other web developers on the Digital Services team and assist with custom or complex web development requests.

Education and Experience:

Knowledge of digital accessibility requirements ( WCAG 2.0)

Expertise in WordPress Block Editor and Full Site Editing

Experience monitoring and troubleshooting high availability, production services

Proficiency in MySQL and ability to write effective SQL queries

Knowledge of using AWS S3 buckets for media offloading and CDN integration for enhanced content delivery.

Proficient in reviewing access and PHP logs with tools like New Relic and Splunk to ensure optimal system performance

Proficient in data analysis and adept at leveraging various tools and technologies to make informed, data-driven decisions.

Comfortable navigating between highly technical teams and environments to those more service- and customer-oriented

Knowledge of package managers such as Node, NPM , Webpack, and WordPress scripts

Ability to translate extremely technical concepts to non-technical audiences

Experience with Adobe Creative Suite and prototyping software

Expert knowledge of best practices in UX/UI and information architecture

Experience with using Composer to manage packages and plugins for PHP projects, ensuring efficient dependency management and integration

Experience in integrating and utilizing the WordPress REST API

Essential Skills:

Experience with multisite WordPress networks

Expert-level proficiency in PHP , HTML , CSS , and JavaScript; must write clean, well-formed code

Experience in PHP and WordPress development

Strong skills in identifying and resolving PHP errors

Experience with Git, code repositories, and Git flow methodologies

Excellent communication and collaboration skills

Demonstrable working knowledge of WP- CLI , essential for managing WordPress settings, users, and data directly from the command line

AA/EEO Statement:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or status as a protected veteran.