WordPress Platform Developer

Part-time contract. Fully remote. Ongoing.

Reports to: Jeremy Launder, Technical Co-Founder.

About Oh My Hi

Oh My Hi is a managed WordPress platform for small business owners, authors, creators, and direct sellers who are not technical and want to DIY their website. We host and run their sites on a locked-down, centrally managed stack, so they never install a plugin, run an update, or troubleshoot a white screen. We are a small company in San Diego. My wife Becky runs sales, marketing, and customer operations. I run all development, infrastructure and operations. We have been running Oh My Hi since 2021 and the platform in its current multi-tenant architecture since early 2024.

The role

I have been the only developer on the platform since we launched, and that has stopped working. I am looking for one experienced WordPress developer to share the whole job with me: building on the platform, improving what customers use every day, and keeping several hundred sites current and secure.

This is not site building. There is a real application behind Oh My Hi: it provisions customer sites, attaches custom domains, sets up sending domains and DNS records, reacts to subscription changes, and tears the whole thing down again on cancellation. It runs on background job chains talking to external APIs. If that sounds like a good problem, you will like this job.

I will stay closely involved in technical direction, planning, and code review, so you would not be inheriting this on your own. We are looking for an individual freelance developer rather than an agency.

What you would work on

Product features our customers touch every day. Custom blocks and a pattern library built with the standard WordPress block tooling, full site editing theme, and admin tools designed for people who are not developers. On the near list: gating pages behind CRM tags using account-free magic links, and self-service plan upgrades that move a site between tiers.

Integrations with the other platforms our customers use. We built the SMS integration that connects the CRM we bundle to a text-messaging platform, including two-way contact sync, background processing for large batches, and our own partner connection system so a customer never has to handle an API key. We have also built product sync between two commerce platforms, an Instagram feed with its own block and caching layer, and a transactional email sync. There is always another platform someone wants connected.

AI and MCP. We are building a self-hosted MCP server with its own OAuth 2.1 authorization server, exposing a curated set of WordPress abilities as tools so a customer can create pages and posts on their site by talking to an AI assistant through a custom connector. An initial version is in beta testing and many of the desired abilities need to be built.

The provisioning platform. The application described above, and there is plenty left to build on it. Recent work includes automating the domain swap when a customer attaches their own domain, building the offboarding chain, and atomic inventory reservation so two runs cannot claim the same site.

Hard problems that need real digging. When a customer says a form submission never arrived, or a site is behaving strangely, someone has to read the server logs and work out what actually happened.

Releases. Shipping updates across our repositories, and occasionally turning a security patch around the same day a vendor puts one out.

What we need you to already know

  • At least three years of professional WordPress development, building products rather than client sites.
  • Modern object-oriented PHP inside WordPress. Namespaces, autoloading, PSR-4.
  • How to change another plugin’s behavior with hooks and filters instead of forking it. A large share of the work is exactly this.
  • Custom database tables, direct database queries, WP-CLI commands, and the WordPress REST API on both the serving and the consuming side.
  • Background processing with Action Scheduler.
  • Integrating third-party REST APIs in production, including rate limits, error handling, and making a create call safe to run twice.
  • WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions past the point of store setup. Every provisioning chain we have starts at a subscription status change.
  • Git and GitHub, and comfort working inside a documented branch and release process.
  • AI-assisted development. We use Claude Code every day, and every pull request goes through human and automated review before it merges.
  • Enough Linux to be useful over SSH, meaning you can read a server log and run WP-CLI against a site. This is not a DevOps role and you will not be managing servers, but you should not be uncomfortable at a terminal.

Useful, but not required

  • Managed multi-tenant WordPress hosting and Gridpane-specific experience a plus. 
  • DNS, custom hostnames, SSL, and transactional email (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
  • Block editor work, including custom blocks, theme.json, and global styles.
  • Bash scripting for our server automation.
  • GitHub Actions – ours mostly automate plugin updates and release builds.

How we work

We prefer the targeted solution over the general-purpose one. A plugin that solves our problem plus twenty things we do not need is not a shortcut, because everything we install ships to every customer site and becomes ours to maintain.

Everything ships through GitHub with a documented branch and release process. Pull requests get automated review and we act on what it finds. Every repository carries its own written conventions, and we keep them current.

We design for the person using it. Our customers build their own sites and most of them are not technical, so we avoid adding features they cannot work out on their own.

Scheduling is flexible and the work is friendly to asynchronous communication.

Who does well here

Someone who would rather go deep on one evolving product than ship a lot of client sites. Someone who communicates without being chased, speaks up when something is unclear, brings up concerns before they turn into major problems, and is comfortable working alongside a technical co-founder who will have opinions. Someone reliable and self-managing who takes the quality of their own work seriously.

The details

  • Part-time contract (1099) on a monthly retainer, up to $2,000 per month to start.
  • Fully remote, but we need some overlap with Pacific Time hours for meetings. Otherwise you work on your own schedule.
  • Ongoing work rather than a fixed project. I am looking for someone who wants to stay.
  • Room to grow. If this works, there is more work and more budget.

This is probably not a fit if

Your WordPress experience is mostly page builders and client sites. You would rather add a plugin than write the code. You want to redesign our process before you have shipped anything with it. You would not be available to turn around an urgent security patch on the rare days one lands.

How to apply

Email me at [email protected]. Tell me about a plugin or product you built and then maintained, and roughly how many hours a month you can commit. A link to code is worth more than a resume. If we are both at WordCamp US, come find me. I’ll have the yellow San Diego Padres hat on.

Jeremy Launder
Co-founder, Oh My Hi