Senior Web Developer

Job Description

The Ad Firm is a Digital Marketing Agency based in Southern California, serving clients nationwide. Since 2009, we’ve helped businesses grow through SEO, content, and performance-driven digital strategies.

We’re expanding our team and looking for a Senior Web Developer to lead how our websites are built from the ground up. This is not a production role. This is a systems-level engineering role for someone who understands that websites are not just design deliverables, they are performance assets that need to rank, scale, and hold up under real-world conditions.

This is a remote position with flexible working hours from day one.

About the Role

• Own the technical foundation of the websites we build
• Architect, develop, and optimize custom builds for SEO, performance, and scalability
• Work closely with SEO, Content, and Digital PR teams to ensure strong technical execution
• Build systems that are clean, scalable, and maintainable
• Focus on engineering quality over page builders or pre-built themes
  
  

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build fully custom WordPress websites (themes, plugins, ACF-driven structures)
• Engineer sites for speed, scalability, and strong Core Web Vitals performance
• Handle server environments, deployments, and infrastructure decisions
• Integrate APIs and third-party systems cleanly and reliably
• Own technical SEO implementation (crawlability, indexation, structured data)
• Manage DNS, CDN (Cloudflare), SMTP, and hosting configurations
• Work across Shopify and BigCommerce at the code level when needed
• Implement accurate tracking (GA4, GTM) without compromising data integrity
• Debug issues across the full stack (server, backend, frontend performance)
  
  

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of web development experience in agency or performance-driven environments
• Deep expertise in PHP (including WordPress core-level development)
• Strong JavaScript experience with modern frameworks and tooling
• Working knowledge of Python (automation, scraping, tooling)
• Proven experience building custom WordPress websites from scratch
• Strong understanding of technical SEO and its impact on architecture and performance
• Ability to diagnose and solve full-stack issues independently
  
  

What Sets You Apart

• You think in systems, not pages
• Experience working on large-scale or SEO-heavy websites
• Strong understanding of crawlability, indexation, and internal linking at scale
• Experience with schema and structured data implementation
• Exposure to programmatic SEO or dynamic page generation
• Experience handling real-world constraints (traffic spikes, broken deployments, legacy rebuilds)
  
  

Strong Advantages

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and Git workflows
• Familiarity with Docker or modern dev environments
• Experience with log analysis and advanced debugging
• Security hardening and site recovery experience
• Experience with multi-site or multi-location SEO builds
  
  

What We Don’t Want

• Heavy reliance on page builders
• Plugin-first approaches to performance and SEO
• Developers who need constant direction or step-by-step instructions
  
  

Why Join Us?

• High ownership with real technical decision-making
• Clean builds with no unnecessary bloat
• Direct collaboration with SEO, Content, and Digital PR specialists
• A team that values performance, scalability, and engineering quality
• Competitive salary and performance-based incentives
• Flexible remote work from day one
• 2 weeks Paid Time-Off
• Paid Sick Leave
• 8 Paid Holidays
• Health Insurance
  
  

Ready to Apply?

• Submit your resume
• Include a portfolio with examples of custom builds
• Add a short note on how you approach building high-performance websites