Senior Backend Engineer

About the Make it All Work: 

Make It All Work (MIAW) is a full-service technology, consulting, and web development firm based in New York City. MIAW brings brands to life by designing classy, clean, and modern websites using the highest standards of development and coding practices.

In addition to its design and development capabilities, MIAW maintains websites, manages web presences, handles all types of SEO, develops custom hosting and server solutions, develops mobile apps, and more.

Job Summary

The Senior Backend Developer is an essential, high-seniority contract role responsible for the end-to-end success and health of client backend systems. This position is critical for improving client interactions, taking full ownership of technical tasks, and reducing dependency on the current architecture and infrastructure leader. The role will handle all aspects of backend development, deployment, and ongoing maintenance, balancing deep technical execution with client understanding to ensure project flow. 

Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Backend Development & Ownership: Take full of backend development within existing systems, including technical execution, participation in discovery phases, and post-deployment monitoring. Engineers are expected to follow their deployments. Identify issues in production and treat operational stability as part of the definite done. 

• Code Health & Monitoring: Actively monitor deployed code using tools like Sentry or Rollbar, and manage backend maintenance to ensure code health and stability.

• Maintenance: Handle complex system maintenance, including debugging, carefully updating WordPress and plugins, and testing all changes locally to avoid critical client feature breaks.

• Integrations: Manage and maintain complex integrations, including APIs and webhooks. A significant part of this role involves real-world integration debugging - troubleshooting webhook failures, API errors, data transformation issues, and authentication edge cases in live production environments, not just building integration. 

• Client Interaction: Serve as a client-facing resource (approximately 5-10% of time) to communicate and manage technical issues and client expectations.

• Project Support: Engage in feature scoping with project management (PM) and provide necessary QA support.

• Systems Optimization & Automation: Ability to identify system inefficiencies and implement automation or AI-assisted workflows to improve debugging, monitoring, development speed, and operational reliability.

• Knowledge Transfer & Documentation: Create deployment documentation to facilitate knowledge transfer and assist new developers.

Qualifications and Experience

• Experience Level: Must have strong seniority and self-directed initiative — able to own complex problems end-to-end without close oversight.

• Technical Competency: Strong backend development experience building and maintaining API-driven systems. Hands-on experience with the WordPress ecosystem is essential, including deep familiarity with plugin architecture, WordPress hooks and actions, debugging plugin conflicts, and executing safe update strategies for production sites.

• Integration Experience: Demonstrated experience designing, maintaining, and troubleshooting system integrations with CRMs, third-party platforms, and internal tools in live production environments.

• Automation & AI Tooling: Experience identifying opportunities for automation and leveraging AI-assisted tools or workflows to improve development and operational processes.

• Security & Identity: Solid understanding of authentication and identity mechanisms.

• Problem Solving: Strong problem-solving skills with a proven ability to navigate complex, legacy systems and drive issues to resolution without requiring a full rewrite.

• Mindset: Detail-oriented and operationally minded — willing to dive into inherited codebases, take full responsibility for end-to-end impact, and monitor deployments carefully with a production-first attitude.

• Soft Skills: Ability to balance

Salary and Benefits

• Compensation: $45–$65/hour, commensurate with experience and finalized through freelance contract negotiations.

• Structure: This is a Contract/Freelance position.

Work Environment and Location

• Work Arrangement: This is a remote, contract-based position with workload fluctuations.

• Team: The new hire will work in an environment that requires a high degree of autonomy and ownership.

What Success Looks Like in This Role

• Quickly becomes comfortable navigating existing systems and integrations

• Confidently debugs unfamiliar codebases

• Safely deploys fixes and features without destabilizing production

• Proactively monitors deployments and follows through on issues

• Documents key system knowledge for future maintainability