Full-Time WooCommerce/PHP Developer (AI-First Workflow) for US Ecommerce

Full-time WordPress/WooCommerce developer wanted for an established US ecommerce store. You'll ship real production work in week 1 (supplier price reconciliation, hand-coded theme modules, SEO collection pages) through an AI-agent-driven, PR-gated workflow. We sell four-and-five-figure specialty equipment to US consumers (store details shared with shortlisted candidates). This role is an additional developer working alongside the lead dev, mostly async. A NOTE ON TIMING, READ THIS FIRST If AI disrupted your last role, this job is the other side of that coin. We will pay you to become dangerous with AI, not to compete against it. Most of our code is written by AI agents that you direct, review, and correct; your judgment is the product, and we pay for the AI tooling. The developers who thrive here are the ones who decided to make AI their daily power tool instead of their replacement. If that's the turn you've been wanting to make, this is a role built for it. WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO - New product builds: create products from scratch. Full product pages with specs tables, pricing, add-on options, images, category/collection placement, schema, and unique written content. We regularly onboard entire supplier catalogs (30-40 products in a run), so this is repeatable-pipeline work, not one-offs. - Catalog and pricing ops: "audit all brands' pricing against MAP," sweep for discontinued and stock-status accuracy, fix SKUs and lead times, manage coupons. Detail-heavy and error-intolerant. A wrong price on a $5,000 scooter loses real money. - Theme frontend: hand-rolled PHP/CSS/JS feature modules in a Shoptimizer child theme. Recent examples include "make the entire product card clickable" and cart/checkout polish. No page builders; Elementor is being migrated out. - Long-form content with AI: blog posts, buying guides, and product comparisons. AI-drafted at scale, fact-checked against real product specs, edited until they read human and rank. Accuracy is non-negotiable: our content makes claims about equipment people depend on. - SEO execution: build weight-capacity collection pages (300-600 lb tiers), apply JSON-LD schema, fix canonicals and 301s, triage Google Search Console and Merchant Center alerts. - Audits: GMC structured-data warnings, broken links, image issues, mobile layout bugs flagged from the owner's screenshots. Week 1 looks like: run a large discontinued-product sweep against our marking protocol, update one brand's prices against a supplier sheet, fix a broken-link class (not just the reported instance), and browser-verify everything on a sandbox clone before opening a PR. HOW WE WORK (PLEASE READ THIS TWICE) - AI-first. Most code is written by Claude Code agents on sandboxed clones of the live store. Your job is writing precise briefs, critically reviewing AI diffs, catching what agents get wrong, and hand-coding the hard 20%. Treat an agent like a fast junior whose work you're accountable for. If you think AI code is slop, or you'd ship agent output unreviewed, this isn't for you. We need the person in between: the one who turned AI into their leverage. - Parallel by default. Our setup runs multiple isolated sandbox environments, and we expect you to drive several workstreams at once: one agent building product pages while another runs a pricing sweep, while you review a third's diff. If you've only ever worked one ticket at a time, this will feel different. We pay for the AI harness of your choice (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or equivalent). What we're hiring is your proven ability to get consistently excellent results out of it. - Prod is PR-gated. No direct server edits, ever, not even one-line fixes. Sandbox first, PR, human-gated deploy, selective cache purge, then browser verification. Full cache purges on prod are treated as incidents here, not conveniences. "It deployed" is not "it works." - Async, fast, blunt. Tasks arrive as WhatsApp messages, voice notes, and annotated screenshots. Daily numbered status updates are the standup. Significant US Eastern Time overlap required. MUST-HAVE SKILLS - Deep WooCommerce internals. You've debugged Woo, not just configured it: product/variation meta, pricing, hooks, transient caches - Strong WordPress PHP (hooks/filters, custom modules, not builder configuration) - Git/PR discipline; comfort with wp-cli and MySQL on a VPS - Cache-layer literacy (LiteSpeed + Cloudflare): selective purges, cache-buster verification - Technical SEO for ecommerce: schema, indexing, redirects, GSC/GMC - Demonstrated AI-agent mastery: a track record of shipping superb results through AI coding tools, including running multiple tasks/agents in parallel with quality control on each - Content creation with AI: spec-accurate product copy and long-form blog/buying-guide content (AI-drafted, human-verified, genuinely unique) - Clear, fast written English Nice to have: Node.js, Typesense, Merchant Center feeds/Content API, Permalink Manager/Yoast internals, performance auditing (LCP/CLS). ENGAGEMENT - Full-time position, starting immediately. This is your primary work, not a side engagement. Continuation is subject to performance, with a minimum horizon of a few months and long-term intent for the right person. - Please do not apply if you have a day job or another major commitment. We've been down that road: split attention means nothing ships. We'd rather hear from fewer, fully-available candidates. - Rate: $7-12/hr depending on experience. We choose on value, not the lowest bid, so quote the rate that honestly matches your level. - Tools (AI subscriptions included) are provided; results are expected. TO APPLY: the first paragraph of your proposal must be (1) a specific story of an AI coding tool confidently doing the wrong thing and how you caught it, and (2) a plain statement of your current availability and any other ongoing engagements. Generic openers are not read.