Full-Stack Developer- Drupal

Compensation: $140k – $160k AUD • No equity

Location: Australia (Remote, with occasional client-site or hybrid presence) Experience: 8–12 years total, including 6+ years hands-on Drupal Engagement: Freelance / Contract / Consultant — full-time or part-time, flexible Team: Small, senior, product-and-services hybrid. You will be one of a handful of people, not one of a hundred.

About the role We are a growing digital experience practice. We do not have layers between the person who talks to the client and the person who writes the code — and we are not looking to add any. This role is for a consultant who is equally comfortable scoping a Drupal 10 → 11 upgrade on a client call in the morning, writing the custom migration source plugin for it in the afternoon, and fixing the Twig template that broke in the process.

"Full stack" here means what it says: backend modules, frontend theming, and enough DevOps to own your own deployments. If you need a separate themer, a separate backend dev, and a separate DevOps engineer to ship anything, this is not the role.

We are going for Drupal Certified Partner status. We intend to close Bronze tier within 12 months, and this role owns the contribution side of that goal. Bronze requires 150 annual weighted contribution credits and a published case study on drupal.org. That is a real, reachable target — and it means your open-source contribution here is funded, scheduled, and counted as delivery, not something you do at midnight. See the dedicated section below.

What you'll actually do Own the client relationship ● Run discovery sessions, technical workshops, and solution walkthroughs directly with client stakeholders — often without a BA or PM in the room ● Turn vague business goals into scoped, estimated, defensible technical proposals ● Manage expectations on scope, timelines, and trade-offs; say no when no is the right answer ● Produce documentation clients actually use: solution designs, upgrade plans, editor guides, handover runbooks ● Act as the escalation point when something breaks in production ● Advise honestly on the build-vs-contrib decision — including when the answer is "don't build this in Drupal" Architect and build (backend) ● Lead architecture and delivery on Drupal 10 and 11, with a clear position on Drupal 12 readiness ● Custom module development against the Drupal APIs: plugins, services, dependency injection, event subscribers, hooks, queues, cron ● Entity API, custom entities, fields, and content modelling that survives contact with real editors ● Views, Layout Builder, Paragraphs, Media, and Workflows configured deliberately — not just switched on ● Composer-based workflow, configuration management (Config Split / Config Ignore), and Recipes ● Multilingual and multisite where the client needs it ● Integrations: JSON:API, GraphQL, REST, CRM / marketing automation / payment / SSO (SAML, OAuth, LDAP) ● Write code yourself. This is a hands-on role at every seniority level. Architect and build (frontend) ● Custom theme development: Twig, Single Directory Components (SDC), the theme layer done properly ● Modern CSS/JS workflow — SASS or Tailwind, a real build pipeline, component-driven markup ● Decoupled and headless where it earns its keep: Next.js for Drupal, JSON:API / GraphQL front ends, and the judgement to know when a monolithic theme is the better call ● WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility as a delivery standard, not a remediation phase — critical for our government, education, and nonprofit clients Migrate and modernise ● Own upgrade and migration strategy end-to-end: ○ Drupal 10 → 11 → 12 upgrade paths, deprecation remediation, contrib module readiness audits ○ Drupal 7 rescue work — sites still stranded post-EOL ○ Onto Drupal from elsewhere: WordPress, Sitecore, AEM, Sitefinity, Joomla, Kentico, custom CMS ● Build real migrations with the Migrate API — custom source/process/destination plugins,, not hand-copied content ● Audit legacy implementations: contrib bloat, patch debt, abandoned modules, custom code that should have been contrib ● Plan cutover properly: parallel running, rollback paths, URL and redirect strategy, SEO preservation, DNS/CDN switchover, post-launch validation Make sites fast and keep them up ● Diagnose real performance problems: Core Web Vitals, render and dynamic page cache, BigPipe, Redis/Memcache, Varnish, CDN strategy ● Fix the causes — expensive Views queries, N+1 entity loads, unbounded taxonomy lookups, uncached blocks, oversized images and missing responsive image styles ● Establish performance budgets and monitoring instead of treating speed as a launch-week scramble ● Security as standard practice: track SA-CORE and contrib advisories, patch on a cadence, vet contrib modules before they enter a build, harden file handling, permissions, and user roles ● Own your deployments: Drush, Composer, CI/CD (GitHub Actions / GitLab CI / Bitbucket), automated config import, DDEV or Lando locally ● Work confidently on Acquia, Pantheon, Platform.sh, or plain AWS/Azure Drive us to Drupal Certified Partner — Bronze This is a named deliverable of the role, not a nice-to-have. You will own the contribution programme that gets us certified. ● Own the credit target. Bronze requires a minimum of 150 annual weighted contribution credits, measured on a rolling 12-month basis at renewal. You will plan the route to that number, track it monthly, and tell us early if we are drifting. ● Submit our case study. Bronze requires at least one published case study on drupal.org. You will write it — and target a Drupal 11 build, which carries a higher credit weight than older versions. ● Do the issue queue work that actually counts. Credits are weighted by project reach: issues on core, strategic initiatives, and very widely-used contrib modules are worth substantially more than fixes on niche projects. You will pick targets deliberately rather than contributing wherever is convenient. ● Convert client work into contribution. The highest-leverage habit in this ecosystem is spotting when a client bug or feature belongs upstream, and pushing it there instead of patching locally. We want that to become standard practice on every project. ● Bring the rest of the team with you. Set up contribution time, review juniors' patches, get everyone's drupal.org profile correctly attributed to the organisation — unattributed contribution earns us nothing. ● Represent us in the community. Speak at or help us sponsor DrupalCamps and DrupalCon, run local meetups, and build the relationships that generate both credits and referrals. ● Advise on the commercials. Flag when sponsorship, event participation, or module maintainership is the more efficient path to the target than raw issue work. Help build the practice ● Mentor junior developers and review their work ● Contribute to pre-sales: estimates, proposals, solution decks, client demos ● Support our Acquia partner standing alongside the Drupal Association track — certification requirements, tier maintenance, and referenceable implementations

Requirements Drupal (mandatory) ● 6+ years hands-on Drupal delivery, with at least one full lifecycle as lead architect or lead developer ● Strong, current experience on Drupal 10 and/or 11 — non-negotiable ● Deep understanding of the Drupal object-oriented APIs, plugin system, and service container ● Entity API and content modelling at scale ● Migrate API — you have written custom migration plugins, not just run ● Configuration management and Composer-based workflow in a multi-environment setup ● Custom theme development from scratch, including Twig and SDC ● Working knowledge of Drupal CMS (Starshot) and where it fits for faster-start client builds Language, framework & data ● PHP 8.3+ and modern OOP practice ● Symfony components as used by Drupal core (HttpFoundation, DI, EventDispatcher, Routing) ● MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL, including query profiling and index work ● Solr / Search API for anything beyond basic search ● Testing: PHPUnit, Behat, or Nightwatch — some automated test discipline required Frontend ● Twig, SDC, and the Drupal theme layer ● Modern CSS (SASS or Tailwind) and JavaScript with a real build pipeline ● Decoupled Drupal experience — Next.js for Drupal, JSON:API, GraphQL ● WCAG 2.2 AA in practice, with the audit and remediation experience to back it Hosting & DevOps ● Acquia, Pantheon, Platform.sh, or self-managed AWS / Azure ● CI/CD pipeline configuration and troubleshooting ● Drush, Composer, DDEV / Lando ● Docker / Kubernetes exposure (good to have) Certifications & standing ● Acquia Certified Drupal Developer — mandatory (or demonstrable equivalent depth we can verify in a technical conversation) ● Acquia Certified Grand Master — strongly preferred ● Acquia Back End Specialist / Front End Specialist / Site Builder — preferred ● An active drupal.org profile with a real contribution history — issue credits, module maintainership, or patch history. Given the Bronze tier goal, this moves from "nice to have" to a core selection criterion. We will look at your profile. ● Experience getting contribution attributed to an employer organisation correctly — or the willingness to learn the mechanics quickly ● Willingness to complete additional certifications required to maintain and advance our Acquia partner tier

Who this suits ● You can hold a room of client stakeholders and a debugger with equal confidence ● You estimate honestly and defend your numbers ● You know the contrib ecosystem well enough to avoid rebuilding what already exists — and well enough to know which modules are quietly abandoned ● You already contribute, or have wanted to and never had an employer who paid for it. Here it is part of the job and part of the plan. ● You are comfortable with ambiguity, thin process, and shifting priorities, because that is the reality of a small team ● You context-switch across two or three clients in a week without dropping threads ● You document well enough that the next person doesn't have to ask you ● You have opinions about Drupal and can argue them without being difficult Who this doesn't suit ● Anyone who does not use AI tools. ● Anyone who needs a fully-specced ticket before starting work ● Architects who don't code ● Developers who don't want client contact ● Site builders who can configure Views but can't write a custom plugin ● Backend developers who won't touch Twig — or themers who won't touch PHP ● Anyone whose Drupal experience effectively stopped at Drupal 7 ● Anyone who treats upstream contribution as overhead. It is a stated commercial objective of this role.

How to apply Send your CV along with: 1. Two Drupal builds you led — your specific role, the architecture, and what you'd do differently now 2. A migration or major-version upgrade you ran (source platform, content volume, timeline, what went wrong) 3. Your drupal.org profile — we will look at your contribution history — plus any Acquia certification IDs 4. A link to custom code we can look at — a contrib module, a patch, a public repo 5. A short view on how you'd get an organisation from zero to 150 weighted credits in a year. We are not looking for a plan document, just how you'd think about it. 6. Availability, preferred engagement model, and time-zone overlap with India you can commit to Short technical conversation first, then a scenario-based architecture and estimation discussion. No take-home coding tests.*