Perch is a small-but-mighty design and development shop. We’re based in Little Rock, Arkansas, but are a fully distributed team. Our bread and butter is WordPress-based website design and dev that places a high value on progressive UI/UX design, high-attention-to-detail front-end development, and thoughtful, user-friendly custom admins. In addition to websites, we do everything from UI/UX design, web apps, brand and identity design, and custom development solutions. We’re fortunate to work with some really great clients that range from startups to mom-and-pop shops to large companies to financial institutions to nonprofits.
Current status:All the clients want all the things over the past handful of months, so we’ve experienced some serious growing pains and have been stretched super thin.
That’s where you come in.
Who, What, Why
We’re currently a two-person shop, so you’d be a very important piece of our team. Some quick chicken scratch math says you’d be an entire 1/3 of our team, so you’d be an important and valued part of what we do here at Perch.
Because we’re a small team, we all do a little bit of everything and are looking for someone with either experience in a wide range of development or someone who is eager and quick to learn. Here’s the thing — we aren’t necessarily chasing a unicorn or some kind of mythical creature or a jack of all trades, but we need someone who wants to jump in and play a big role in creating great work - whatever that looks like.
We're looking for a developer who has experience with (custom) WordPress and has some solid front-end chops. In an ideal scenario, you’d be able to be handed mockups and see them through to a fully-realized, custom-built WordPress site. Or you might be given a task list of new features or technical debt for a client site and be expected to complete those items. Or you might be asked to step in during QA and make the final tweaks to a site pre-delivery. That’s just a few examples of the type of work you’d be doing.
Required Skills/Qualifications
- Some level of understanding of all things WordPress: WP installation, coding & security best practices, custom post types, Advanced Custom Fields, etc
- PHP, CSS/3, HTML/5, MySQL, Javascript
- Familiarity with Sass/Less and using compilers, task-runners, postcss
- Git experience
- Able to work with Zeplin/Sketch (design handoff)
(Psst… Ultimately, we’d rather have an awesome person with good skills than a not-so-great person with incredible skills, so if you don’t check every single box, it might still be worth a conversation to see if it could be a fit.)
Nice, but not Required
- Experience working remote
- Gutenberg experience
- React/Gatsby experience
- Comfortable with the command line
What You’d Actually Be Doing
- Building custom websites, web apps, etc (front-end and/or back-end)
- Executing weekly WordPress updates and maintenance on hosted client sites
- Handling existing support tickets/issues
- Communicating with clients
- Working alongside design to plan and execute projects
- CMS training for clients
- Collaborating on estimates/proposals
People-Centric Perks
Whether it’s our clients or our team, people are the most important thing here at Perch. Joining our team means that you’ll be valued and respected and listened to and your work will be appreciated.
Our perks are largely people- and culture-centric. We value time off and work-life balance and mental health and growing professionally and feeling appreciated. So whereas we offer fair compensation, we doubt you’re gonna be making it rain in the club. What we lack in providing all your spare kindling money, we make up for with a great company culture that includes some nice perks. Here’s a few of the biggies:
- A true 32-hour work week (yep, it’s a 3-day weekend every weekend)
- You pick bonus compensation: 1% bonus in December OR 2% added to your salary (upon hire)
- 3 weeks time off
- New Mac (after an initial let’s-make-sure-this-is-a-good-fit period)
- Work from anywhere & relatively flexible hours
- Once-a-year-ish travel for a team meetup (past trips have included Mexico City, New York City, Boston, etc)
- Super laid-back, casual environment
- No meticulous time-tracking (woo hoo!)
(Here's some fine print: If you're looking for health benefits or a 401k, we're not the shop for you. Those things are challenging for small shops like us [though we regularly explore our options]. BUT…we think some of the other perks we offer help to sweeten the deal.)
Ok great, so what does it pay?
Labels are tricky. Things like “junior” or “full stack” or “lead” or whatever have a whole range of different meanings to people and with those definitions come a very, very wide range of salary expectations.
This position is somewhere in that sweet spot right in between what we think is generally viewed as junior and senior. If you have 20 years of senior-level experience, this probably doesn’t make a ton of sense for you. And if you’re a junior dev who only knows React, this isn’t for you either. We think $50,000/year is a reasonable salary expectation for what our team needs, so hopefully that helps to bring a little clarity of the level we’re looking for.
When you Apply
This is your opportunity to stand out. Please let us know you care. Finding someone we can relate to and feel good about working alongside makes a huge difference. We’d love our team to become more diverse, so we very much welcome people applying who look and think and have perspectives that are different than us.
If that’s you, please submit the following:
- An introduction to yourself. It doesn’t have to be a novella, but a little something about where you live, what you like to do, and why you love to code will go a long way.
- Link to your portfolio and/or examples of your work (both front- and back-end work)
- Resumé (primarily to show work history)
- Salary preference/requirement
- A link to the weirdest/dumbest/most awesome thing you’ve seen on the Internet lately.