AI-Native Full-Stack Dev (PHP/WordPress + React/TypeScript)

Who we are Gnostis is a digital media company running a network of roughly 50 review and comparison sites across Scandinavia and Europe - Denmark, Sweden, Finland and other markets. We publish product reviews, rankings and comparison content, monetized through affiliate partnerships. Small team, high rate of change: we're pushing edits and features across many sites every single day. The stack you'd be inheriting WordPress - but not the kind of WordPress you usually see on Upwork. Custom themes, custom post types, affiliate and pricing API integrations pulling live data into our comparison tables, and a long tail of plugins we've bent to purposes they weren't designed for. Deployment and debugging over SSH. Real SQL when the WordPress abstractions get in the way, which is often. Day one to roughly month six, this is the work: fixing things, building features, integrating APIs, and keeping 50 sites healthy without breaking them one at a time. Where this is going We're moving off WordPress and onto our own platform. The likely shape: headless architecture, Next.js front-end in React/TypeScript, paired with either a headless CMS or a backend we build ourselves. That isn't a vague someday - it's the reason this posting exists. We want the person who maintains the current system to be one of the people who builds its replacement. We're hiring for the second job as much as the first. The honest version You'd be doing WordPress and PHP work for a while before you touch the new platform. If that sounds like a bait-and-switch, don't apply. If maintaining WordPress indefinitely sounds perfectly fine and you have no interest in what comes after, also don't apply - you'd be bored and we'd have hired the wrong person. The fit we're looking for is someone who can do the PHP work competently and without drama, while being visibly capable of the React/TypeScript work that's coming. What we need you to already have Strong PHP fundamentals. This is the entry ticket. Not "I can edit a theme" - actual language competence, able to read someone else's messy codebase and work out what it's doing. Database comfort. SQL, indexes, query performance, and the ability to think about data structure rather than assuming WP_Query will solve it. API integration experience. Both consuming third-party REST APIs (with the usual joys: rate limits, flaky responses, caching, stale pricing data) and building your own. AI tools as part of your daily loop. Cursor, Copilot, Claude, whatever you've settled on. See below. Terminal fluency. SSH, Linux basics, log reading, deployment. You shouldn't need a GUI to find out why a site is down. Independence. You'll get context and access, not a spec written in Jira. We need someone who diagnoses, decides, and tells us what they found. The thing we're actually screening for Hands-on exposure to JavaScript/TypeScript and React or Next.js. This is the differentiator, and we'd rather be blunt about it than waste your time. We are not asking for five years of production React. Side projects count. A repo counts. Something you built for yourself and abandoned counts, as long as you can talk about it. What doesn't work: "I've only ever done PHP because that's what my clients needed." We understand how that happens, and it's not a criticism - but it's not who we're hiring. PHP is the entry ticket. JavaScript is the actual reason we'd pick you over the next candidate. On AI tools We're not asking whether you've tried ChatGPT. We're asking whether AI-assisted development is genuinely how you work - in your editor, in your daily loop, meaningfully changing your throughput - and whether you have the judgment to catch it when it's confidently wrong. We'll ask about this specifically, and vague answers are easy to spot. Please don't apply if you are An entry-level WordPress/Elementor site-builder An SEO generalist who does "some development" A developer with zero exposure to and zero interest in modern JS frameworks An agency sending a proposal on behalf of an unnamed team member How this starts A small, paid test task on a real, live project from our network. Scoped up front - you get paid for it regardless of whether we continue. If it goes well: ongoing hourly work with hours ramping up, and a long-term relationship that we'd like to turn into full-time. We're not looking for a one-off contractor. We're looking for the developer who's still here when the new platform ships. Practical details Working language is English. We need a minimum of 4 hours of daily overlap with Central European Time - we're not asking you to relocate your sleep schedule, but we do need to be able to reach you. Long-term, ideally full-time. Say so if that's not what you want. How to apply Answer the screening questions properly. Short and specific beats long and polished - we'd rather have three sentences that show you've done the work than three paragraphs about your commitment to quality. Links to code or live projects are worth more than any adjective you could use about yourself. Start your proposal with the word "HEADLESS" so we know you read to the end.