| | As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem solving skills and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.
UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits and natural beauty. All of which has allowed the UW to be nationally recognized as a “Great College to Work For” for six consecutive years.
Office of Research Information Services (ORIS), a division of the Office of Research, coordinates, develops, and supports electronic research administration for faculty and staff at the University of Washington. Goals include:
•Improve service to Principal Investigators (PIs) and research and administrative staff, enhance their ability to obtain funding, reduce their workload, and streamline the processing of their proposals.
•Provide authorized individuals with convenient access to timely information on the status of proposals and awards.
•Increase the efficiency of the research community to meet growing workload and compliance demands with limited resources.
•Maintain the University of Washington's position as a leading public research University.
The University of Washington’s Office of Research Information Services has an outstanding opportunity for a full time WordPress Web Developer.
Position Purpose:
The WordPress Web Developer for the Office of Research Information Services (ORIS) is the primary developer responsible for developing, maintaining and evolving the UW’s Office of Research website, as well as associated websites and web applications. The UW’s research community on all three campuses utilizes this high-profile collection of WordPress sites to access critical information and conduct their work. The site is also an important vehicle for communicating about the research enterprise to the UW community, peer institutions and the general public.
The Web Developer is part of a web team that includes a project manager/business analyst, communications specialist and product owner. This web team is part of the Office of Research Information Services, which develops and delivers software solutions to the research community.
As a member of the web team, the Web developer will design, develop, test, implement and support the Research websites and applications. This includes providing technical expertise and leadership on website and web application development best practices; staying current on developments with WordPress Core and WordPress plugins to integrate these with our web infrastructure; and designing and implementing enhancement requests. In addition to production support and maintenance releases, this position will likely be involved with projects around customizing the UW’s WordPress theme, developing child themes, implementing information architecture solutions that creatively utilize plugins, implementing a new search solution, migrating and rewriting legacy web applications, further developing our WordPress-based learning management system and learning record store, and connecting new data streams to services. Opportunities also exist to work with infrastructure engineering to improve the resilience of the site using AWS-recommended best practices, address technical debt, and automate a variety of development and deployment processes.
The person in this position is expected to be a WordPress expert with experience implementing and maintaining WordPress sites on cloud-based infrastructure and following best practices for code management and deployment processes. An ideal candidate has a keen eye for detail, a relentless interest in quality, an ability to solve problems independently, technical aptitude and a desire to learn. Strong interpersonal skills are essential to thrive in this highly collaborative environment.
The WordPress Web Developer position requires a highly technical skillset that includes web development practices, content management experience, and knowledge of WordPress best practices. This person should have demonstrated and current skills with PHP, CSS, HTML, HTML5, MySQL and JavaScript, as well as familiarity with cloud-based server environments, RESTful APIs, and code versioning tools. The role primarily requires a proven WordPress developer with the addition of strong PHP skills to maintain custom integration code and maintain or migrate non-WordPress legacy applications. The Web Developer must be adept at managing, balancing and prioritizing multiple requests that compete for implementation. This person must also be skilled at serving the multiple high-profile customers that comprise the research community of the UW. An ability to work independently and make sound decisions is critical.
This role is critical to maintaining access to high-value information and resources researchers and research teams use to do their work every day and contributes to furthering the Office of Research’s mission of accelerating research at the University of Washington. This position designs and maintains the websites and web infrastructure that supports research administration at the UW for roughly 1.6 billion dollars in research grants in 2019.
Responsibilities:
Website/Application Development and Maintenance:
•Architect, design, develop, test, deploy and support websites, web applications and web services in collaboration with others and in compliance with ORIS code management standards
•Manage the WordPress theme and plugin configuration
•Maintain and support legacy web applications
•Rewrite and/or migrate legacy web applications to primary WordPress infrastructure
•Maintain, develop and enhance our WordPress-based learning management system and learning record store
•Support content providers in developing, coding and installing pages
•Identify, evaluate, and propose existing and emerging technologies for their applicability to web development needs
•Understand University policies, business processes and technology systems in order to develop relevant websites/applications
•Meet with users and stakeholders to review prototypes and production ready websites/systems
•Update web content based on user requests and priorities
•Ensure websites are designed, developed and managed in alignment with University policies regarding usability and accessibility
Triage and support:
•Escalation point for web-based production support issues
•Monitor site traffic and error logs and respond to issues in order to ensure system stability
•Perform various maintenance and update tasks to ensure websites, data sources and related applications are operating at peak performance.
•Manage intake or customer change requests using ticket tracking system, responding based on severity and priority of requests
Other Duties as Assigned
This position will primarily be expected to work standard working hours with some monitoring and support responsibilities outside of standard working hours.
Required:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or similar field.
Minimum 3 years’ experience with web technologies, development and maintenance. This experience must include:
•at least 1 year of experience as a WordPress developer
•experience with WordPress Core concepts and software patterns (including actions, hooks and custom plugin development and specifically WordPress Advanced Custom Fields)
•experience building WordPress themes and/or plugins from scratch
•mastery of WordPress coding and security best practices
•experience with PHP, CSS, HTML, HTML5, MySQL, JavaScript
•experience with end-to-end management of content management systems, especially WordPress
•work prioritization, time management, time estimation
•troubleshooting
•using debugging tools
•experience with site launches and updates, including following industry-standard processes and code management methods
•experience evaluating proposed features, designs and vendor software to make recommendations for implementation
•experience configuring Apache servers, including maintaining complex, custom htaccess directives
Equivalent education and/or experience may substitute for minimum requirements.
Desired:
•Experience with WordPress multi-sites
•Experience working on Agile/SCRUM and DevOps teams
•Experience with Jira
•Experience with Google Analytics
•Experience with AWS server environments
•Involvement with the WordPress open source community
•Experience with LAMP environments
•Experience with accessibility standards and knowledge of best practices; experience with ARIA
•Familiarity with user-centered web design
•Experience working with stakeholders
CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT:
This position contributes in a collaborative team work environment. Collaboration among the software developers, website team members, business analysts, quality assurance, support and others is done in a shared space working environment through ad hoc meetings focused on problem-solving, and the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. Inflexible deadlines are common and non-standard working hours can be necessary.
Application Process:
The application process for UW positions may include completion of a variety of online assessments to obtain additional information that will be used in the evaluation process. These assessments may include Work Authorization, Cover Letter and/or others. Any assessments that you need to complete will appear on your screen as soon as you select “Apply to this position”. Once you begin an assessment, it must be completed at that time; if you do not complete the assessment you will be prompted to do so the next time you access your “My Jobs” page. If you select to take it later, it will appear on your "My Jobs" page to take when you are ready. Please note that your application will not be reviewed, and you will not be considered for this position until all required assessments have been completed. |
