5+ years

Hire dedicated WordPress developer on WP-Job. Here are listed all available CV-s from the best specialists.

It takes about 5 years for a programmer to reach the Senior level. However, the market does not need that many senior developers, whose salary is often more than $120,000 a year. Many of the experienced WordPress developers have been working for years in the Middle position, although formally, in terms of skills and knowledge they deserve a higher rank. Therefore, applicants compete quite hard for the Senior position in the company. All applicants have to undergo a rigorous selection process. The requirements for applicants are extremely high.

A senior developer must have high Hard Skills and a whole set of Soft Skills. He must be not only a technical specialist, but also a manager, a mentor, and a salesman capable of finding a common language with the client, getting him interested in making a deal, negotiating with him on more loyal terms, or postponing deadlines, for example.

How to hire dedicated WordPress developer correctly

First of all, you should understand whether the candidate has the necessary technical skills. It is important that such a person can think systematically, understand how to solve problems of all types in his direction, and write code that will not only be clean, but also easy to support, maintain and understand for other programmers, and junior colleagues, testers.

Knowledge requirements for applicants for the Senior position may vary from company to company. But in general terms, a specialist at this level should have an in-depth knowledge of the following technologies:

1. Memory management. Working with segments of memory data, and virtual memory allocation.
2. Data structures. Tail recursion, memory allocation for dynamic arrays, self-balancing trees, Radix, Hash table implementation and collision protection, Heap, and performance comparison and priorities of linked queues, stacks, and lists.
3. Programming Paradigms. Patterns and UML diagrams for them, lambda, currying, G.R.A.S.P.
4. Architectures. Multilevel, message-based, UML classes and case diagrams.
5. Networks. Network masks, DNS/DDNS, RPC, packet contents, Wireshark, the difference between HTTP 1.0 and 1.1, SOAP.
6. SQL and NoSQL. MongoDB sharding, ACID, normal forms, Master-slave set up, advanced search mechanisms, MongoDB data aggregation framework, transaction isolation levels, and table splitting.
7. XML, IT security technologies, optimization, markup and styles (HTML, CSS), and several programming languages including JavaScript, PHP, and C++.

And that’s just a short list of technical knowledge, Hard Skills for Senior developers. An untrained person cannot test the level of skills of a programmer applying for such a high rank. You must already have an experienced developer on staff for such interviews and tests. But you can get an idea of his Soft Skills during a personal conversation, as well as during the first few weeks of the internship.

What a Dedicated WordPress Developer should be like

There are a few critical qualities for seniors that are relatively easy to determine if they are present or absent. By talking to the applicant and then watching him or her work, you will understand if he or she is capable of:

1. Work in a team in different roles – partner, subordinate, manager.
2. Communicate with customers, convey their point of view, and look convincing and charming.
3. Strive for and achieve professional growth.
4. Sell products and services, successfully pass interviews.
5. Work with the professional community and personal brand.
6. Solve problems independently and identify the reasons for them.
7. Train newcomers, and advise less experienced or knowledgeable colleagues.

If already during the first contact with the candidate you realized that he is not motivated, communicative and independent enough, it is unlikely that he will show himself well in the position of Top WordPress Developer. But it is quite possible that he would be quite suitable for the Middle rank.