Web Developer

Role summary

Web Developer is a role at American Immigration Council in Washington, District of Columbia, United States (remote). Posted 2026-08-15. Salary: USD 85,000–100,000 per year. Experience level: 5-10.

Job title

Web Developer

Company

American Immigration Council

Location

Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Work arrangement

remote

Category

Software Engineering

Salary

USD 85,000–100,000 per year

Experience level

5-10

Date posted

2026-08-15

Job description

Description

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.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Web Developer to serve as the in-house technical owner of our WordPress 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.

What You'll Do

Theme and Front-End Development (~40%)

Build and maintain custom WordPress 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 WordPress 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 WordPress core, theme, and plugin update cycle for multiple WordPress 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

Requirements

4-6 years of professional experience building and maintaining WordPress 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 WordPress 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

Nice to Have

Familiarity with managed WordPress hosting (Pantheon, WP Engine) and CI/CD via GitHub Actions

Experience with local development environments (DDEV, Local, Docker)

Experience with a templating layer such as Timber/Twig

Experience with Gutenberg block development, including custom blocks and block patterns

Nonprofit, advocacy, or mission-driven organization experience

You won't need to arrive as an expert in every layer of our stack — this role works closely with our external development/hosting agency and payment systems consultant, and over time you'll build fluency in working knowledge of Elasticsearch or ElasticPress, CRM or advocacy platforms (EveryAction, Quorum, or similar), multilingual sites (Polylang, WPML), GA4 and tag management, and our Stripe payment integration as you grow into a larger role supporting the J-1 payment system.

Don't check every box? We'd still like to hear from you if you're strong on the required qualifications above — the rest we're happy to help you grow into.

Work Environment

This is a fully remote position. Employees are expected to maintain a home workspace conducive to focused, professional work and have reliable internet access. This is an exempt position; occasional evening or weekend availability may be required to respond to time-sensitive site issues. Responsibilities include extended periods of sitting at a workstation and frequent use of a PC or laptop for prolonged hours. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this role.

Why Join Us

Own the technical backbone of an organization doing meaningful work in the immigration space, with real autonomy and a clear path to grow your scope.

Compensation and Benefits

Salary Range: $85,000–$100,000 , commensurate with exper