Web Developer

About the American Immigration Council

The American Immigration Council works to create a more welcoming and fair immigration system. Through litigation, research, and programs that expand access to legal assistance, the Council helps ensure immigrants are embraced, communities are enriched, and justice prevails for all.

We're looking for a Web Developer to serve as the in-house technical owner of our Word Press properties. This is a hands-on build-and-maintain role: you'll develop new page templates and blocks, extend and troubleshoot our custom theme and plugins, keep our sites patched and healthy, and partner with our external development agency on hosting and larger projects.

You'll work closely with colleagues across Marketing & Communications, Research, Legal, and Programs who bring you the content and campaigns that need to ship. You'll also coordinate with two external partners: a development agency that handles hosting and maintenance, and a consultant who maintains our custom payment system for J-1 visa sponsorship services.

The ideal candidate is comfortable owning a codebase, communicating clearly with non-technical stakeholders, and learning quickly in a small team where you'll be the primary technical voice in the room. This role is a strong fit for a developer with roughly 4-6 years of experience who wants meaningful ownership and room to grow.

Theme and Front-End Development (~40%)

• Build and maintain custom Word Press themes, page templates, and reusable components
• Develop Gutenberg blocks and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) configurations that give content editors flexible, well-guarded building blocks
• Write clean, accessible, responsive HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that meets WCAG 2.1 AA standards
• Translate designs and content requirements into working pages, and troubleshoot layout and rendering issues across browsers and devices

Plugin Development and Back-End Work (~25%)

• Extend Word Press through custom plugins and functionality: custom post types, taxonomies, admin interfaces, REST endpoints, and third-party API integrations
• Maintain and debug existing custom code
• Write and optimize PHP with attention to security, performance, and maintainability

Site Maintenance and Platform Health (~20%)

• Own the Word Press core, theme, and plugin update cycle for multiple Word Press sites: test in staging, resolve conflicts, and deploy safely
• Monitor site performance, uptime, and errors; diagnose and resolve issues as they arise
• Apply security best practices and respond to vulnerability disclosures promptly
• Manage local, staging, and production environments and use version control and CI/CD workflows for all deployments
• Serve as the day-to-day technical point of contact for our external development and hosting partner, and coordinate with our payment systems consultant on anything that touches the J-1 sponsorship workflow

Collaboration and Support (~15%)

• Support colleagues with page builds, campaign launches, forms, and troubleshooting requests
• Implement and QA analytics and tag management changes in partnership with the team
• Write and maintain documentation for the codebase, environments, and recurring processes
• Provide light technical guidance to web editors on publishing workflows and site conventions

• 4-6 years of professional experience building and maintaining Word Press sites
• Strong PHP skills and demonstrated experience with custom theme development (not just page builders or off-the-shelf themes)
• Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; comfort with modern CSS layout and vanilla JS
• Experience with Git-based workflows and deploying to staging and production environments
• Working knowledge of the Word Press plugin ecosystem, including how to evaluate and safely update third-party plugins
• Experience with Advanced Custom Fields or comparable content modeling tools
• Ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical colleagues and to scope work realistically
• Comfort working independently and prioritizing across competing requests

• Familiarity with managed Word Press hosting (Pantheon, WP Engine) and CI/CD via Git Hub Actions
• Experience with local development…