WooCommerce / Back-end or Full-Stack Developer (NO AGENCIES)

No agencies! We're building a custom e-commerce / booking site on WordPress + WooCommerce for a boat trip / charter business. Customers book trips (dates, time slots, passenger counts) and pay on our site, like an e-commerce checkout. On top of that, we need a portal for agents/affiliates who can register their own customers, create bookings for them, and pay directly on our site. Airtable is our backend and management layer. We don't want a booking system built inside WordPress. Instead, the site connects to Airtable via a custom integration — Airtable holds availability, trips, customers, bookings, and agent data, and our team manages operations from there. Your job is to make that connection clean, reliable, and secure. This is a build-from-scratch project. We are not looking for someone who assembles the site from off-the-shelf plugins. This can become a full-time role. We're starting with this project, but if it goes well, we want to bring the right developer on full-time as our ongoing back-end developer. If you're looking for a long-term home rather than a one-off gig, this is built for that. Hard requirements — please read before applying: No third-party plugins. All custom functionality (the Airtable integration, the agent/affiliate portal, checkout logic) must be built as our own custom plugins. No WooCommerce Bookings, no affiliate plugins, no page builders, no Airtable connector plugins — the Airtable integration is custom code against their API. No front-end framework. No React, Vue, Angular, etc. The front end is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, hand-written and clean. Everything must look polished and professional, and the code must be optimized for both security and speed. How we work / your role VERY IMPORTANT: Front End is optional because we have a front end developer We design the front end ourselves using Claude Design and hand you the generated markup. Your job on the front-end side is to clean, refactor, harden, and optimize that code into production-grade output — secure, fast, accessible, semantic, maintainable. We're not asking you to invent the design; we're asking you to turn a design into excellent code. On the back end, the priority is a rock-solid Airtable integration: reading availability/pricing from Airtable, writing bookings and customer data back to it, handling sync timing, errors, and rate limits gracefully so nothing gets double-booked or lost. We also want you to think about how our non-technical team will actually operate this between the website and Airtable, and propose the most intuitive setup. Scope of work Custom Airtable integration — pull trips/availability/pricing from Airtable into the site; push bookings, orders, and customer data back to Airtable; handle errors, rate limits, and sync reliability. Trip booking & checkout — customers select a trip/date/slot, book, and pay through WooCommerce, with the booking recorded in Airtable. Agent / affiliate portal — agents register, add and manage their own customers, create and pay for bookings on our site, with their activity tracked in Airtable. Agents must not see each other's data. Front-end refactor & optimization — take our Claude-designed markup and ship it as clean, secure, fast, framework-free code. Ideal candidate Strong WooCommerce + WordPress internals (custom plugins, hooks, REST API, the order/checkout pipeline). Real experience integrating WordPress with external APIs like Airtable — sync logic, error handling, rate limits, keeping data consistent across two systems. Excellent vanilla PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS — no framework crutches. A genuine focus on security (sanitization, nonces, capability checks, safe payments, protecting API keys) and performance (queries, caching, asset loading). Cares about clean architecture another developer could pick up later. Wants a long-term, full-time role — not just a single contract. To apply, please answer: Share 1–2 examples of custom WooCommerce work and/or a WordPress ↔ external API integration you've built from scratch. How would you keep availability and bookings in sync between WooCommerce and Airtable so two customers can't book the same slot? A few sentences is enough. How would you structure the agent portal so agents manage their own customers but can't see each other's data? Confirm you're comfortable with no front-end framework and only custom plugins. Are you open to a full-time role if the project goes well?