Senior CMS Engineer

Job Title: Senior CMS Engineer

Department: Development

The Role:

Our projects vary in size and often include features and functionality that go beyond traditional brochure sites with a simple CMS. We integrate our client’s sites with a variety of systems, services, and APIs, such as e-commerce, search engines, CRMs and marketing automation tools, digital asset management systems, ERP systems, and more.

The focus of this role is on CMS-based development, writing custom integrations, plugins and other code that connects CMS-driven websites to external APIs and systems. You should have experience with one or more CMS platforms and be comfortable with frontend skills like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS as well as backend skills like Node.js, PHP, etc.

We expect engineers at this level to do their work with AI agents. We use a spec-driven process to plan and specify features with AI before anyone starts implementing them, and our senior engineers help set the AI development standards that the rest of the team follows. We're looking for people who have already built this into how they work and have opinions about what makes it go well.

You’ll be working on 3-4 projects at any time; typically one to two larger projects and a few smaller projects to keep things fresh. We’re a fast-paced agency with a great team environment, so you’ll never get bored. We need someone who loves keeping up-to-date on the newest advancements in the field and can figure out when to start applying those advancements to client work. You'll work with other smart developers who can help you grow and challenge you, as well as help you along the way. You’ll also be communicating directly with clients and with our project managers to understand their requirements and present your work. Your job will be fun, challenging, and interesting.

Key Responsibilities:

• Building new applications, websites, and features with a variety of platforms including Craft CMS, WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, and more.
• Planning and implementing work with AI agents, using our spec-driven process to settle the approach before the code gets written, and helping set the AI development standards that more junior engineers follow.
• Acting as the Technical Lead (TL) on your projects. You'll partner with the project manager to lead the project’s development team, and you'll share ownership of the project's financial success alongside its technical success, including managing scope against the budget and raising problems early enough to do something about them.
• Serving as the point of escalation for other engineers on your projects, keeping an eye on architectural decisions and code quality, and guiding more junior developers.
• Contributing to high-level architecture planning and consulting with our internal team on approach and level of effort.
• Flexing your muscles on aspects of application development outside of app code: database modeling, query optimization, setting up efficient logging and monitoring solutions, and other advanced requirements for highly functioning apps (you do not need to be a DBA/Systems Administrator/DevOps expert).
• Working closely with our frontend and backend engineers on website projects.
• Writing and maintaining clear documentation of your work, so that others on the team can pick up where you left off or learn from your experience on a project.
• Staying up-to-date on the latest development technologies and methodologies.
• Communicating directly with clients and our project managers to understand their requirements, work through specifications, make technical decisions, and present status updates and demos.

Skills & Qualifications:

• You should have a minimum of 5 years of professional experience, preferably in a technical role and with agency experience.

• Deep experience with one or more CMS platforms, both implementing and customizing them to meet the needs of a project.

• Full Stack experience with a variety of frontend and backend tools and technologies and their surrounding ecosystems is a requirement for this role.

• Experience interacting with and building backend REST and GraphQL APIs

• Knowledge and experience with integrating with third party APIs

• Hands-on experience using AI agents for planning and development in a production codebase, including reviewing what the agent produces before it ships.

• Experience leading a development team or acting as a technical lead, including partnering with a project manager on scope, estimates, and budget.

• Comfort talking directly with clients about requirements, technical trade-offs, and project status.

• Experience building out application user experiences and understanding user behavior and intent, and using this information to build intuitive apps and websites for our clients.

• Knowledge of Git and Github, we use these on all projects.

The salary range for this position is $95,000 - $140,000 per year, depending on experience

What we offer:

• Healthy work/life balance
• A creative environment to do the best work of your career
• An amazing team of developers, designers, marketers, and project managers.
• Paid Parental Leave
• Paid vacation and sick time off
• Health, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Retirement plan with company matching

About Happy Cog:

Happy Cog is a growing interactive agency of 70+ people, all working 100% remotely.

We design, develop, and market websites and mobile apps for a wide variety of clients -- everyone from small startups, to Fortune 100s. Projects we've recently worked on have included online ordering platforms for restaurants, custom content management systems for law firms, an economic mobility research platform, and many more.

We are looking for great people to join our team, so if you don't check all the boxes, but believe you can do the job, reach out and tell us why!

Happy Cog is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, age, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, protected veteran status, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, physical or mental disability.

We are also proud to have been on the Inc 5000 list of America's fastest growing companies for 7 years in a row! For more information go to our website: https://www.happycog.com.