Contract Drupal Developer

Posted: November 2, 2023

This American Life is looking for a part-time Drupal developer to help us maintain and improve our online presence, primarily through our website at thisamericanlife.org. The ideal candidate will be independent, diplomatic, organized, and a clear communicator. This American Life has been on the air since 1995, has won every major award for journalistic excellence, and is hugely popular, with a combined 4.4 million radio listeners and podcast downloads each week.

This role is a remote (US-only) part-time contract role, with an average of 10-15 hours/week, paid at $50-70/hour, commensurate with experience. This person will report to our Digital Manager and collaborate with our Contract Senior Drupal Developer. Contractors are not employees and are not eligible to receive benefits.

Some things you’ll do in this role:

• Maintain and extend a network of three custom Drupal 7 sites plus one API interface hosted across Pantheon and Rackspace Cloud by updating modules and building new custom modules.
• Monitor site performance and ensure maximum uptime across all sites and servers.
• Detect and mitigate DoS attacks as well as excessive bot traffic.
• Audit and improve front-end accessibility.
• Be available for emergencies such as the sites going down or episodes failing to publish.

Experience we’re looking for:

• Extensive knowledge of Drupal 7 with custom themes and modules (PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript/jQuery/AJAX)
• We value the quality of your skills and professional experience over a specific minimum number of years experience, but a successful person in this role would often have 3-5 years of experience with Drupal development.
• Third-party API integrations
• Apache Solr
• Drush
• Pantheon including Terminus
• Rackspace Cloud
• New Relic
• Cloudflare
• Audio processing using ffmpeg
• Server-side scripting
• Version control/Git
• Knowledge of and interest in podcasting and public radio is a plus.

We believe that having a diverse staff is the only way to effectively document the reality of life in this country with the proper nuance and perspective. A more diverse group of people working behind the scenes makes us better at every stage of our processes. So we strongly encourage people of all backgrounds, races, genders, and abilities to apply.

To apply, please send a resume and cover letter to [email protected] by December 3, 2023 at 11:59pm ET. In your cover letter, please tell us why you would be a good fit for this position and what excites you about it. If you have references ready, include them. Please put “Drupal Developer” and your name in the subject line. When you apply you will get a notification that your application was received. If we decide to move forward with your application, we will reach out to you directly to schedule an interview.