---
title: 'Contractor: PHP Website Developer at Newsela'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/contractor-php-website-developer-newsela-latin-america-8gf3qqhw2ed0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Contractor: PHP Website Developer at Newsela

- **Company:** Newsela
- **Location:** Latin America
- **Compensation:** $4k–$5k
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-07-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/newsela/jobs/8052759

## Job description

We are hiring a Contract PHP Website Developer to work on [GenerationGenius.com](http://generationgenius.com). You will refine and break bodies of work into small and iterative deliverables, guide the team in setting achievable sprint goals and will organize sprints to ensure work is delivered with a high degree of quality and in a timely manner. As a member of the Technology team, you will partner closely with Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design to refine ambiguous goals into clearly defined, iterative work items. We work AI-native. Coding agents (Claude Code) are how this team builds, reviews, and operates.

Why You'll Love This Role:

- Someone who owns the full lifecycle. Takes a problem from request to shipped, monitored, and stable in production.
- Comfortable asking questions and shaping scope without heavy PM guidance.
- Raises issues early. Catches risks, design drift, and brittle patterns before they reach production - in their own work and in review. Doesn't wait to be asked.
- Picks up slack outside their lane. Steps into incidents, jumps into a teammate's PR queue, and drives an unowned problem when priorities shift.
- Builds in the AI-native space with discernment. Uses agents as a daily driver, learns their failure modes, and pushes the team's practice forward - not just their own.
- Drives delivery. Active in planning and grooming, pushes back on under-specified work, communicates trade-offs clearly to engineering and product partners.

What You'll Be Doing:

- Ship full-stack features with measurable product impact.
- Provide substantive code review, architectural feedback, not just approvals.
- Serve as a first responder for production issues (within working hours): triage, root cause, and preventive measures recommendations.
- Improve the team's engineering practice over time: tooling, agentic workflows, technical standards, and documentation that lives where work happens.
- Translate product requirements into a technical approach and communicate the reasoning.

About You:

- You have 7+ years of experience in website development using PHP and MySQL.
- You have built complex web applications with maintainable solutions that work and call various services and APIs.
- Advanced knowledge of custom Wordpress development, including data modeling and infrastructure.
- Advanced knowledge and ability to leverage semantic HTML, responsive CSS, and modern design patterns to meet your team’s goals.
- You will be able to communicate technical concepts and processes in English with at least a professional level of proficiency
- Experience with Laravel is a plus
- Experience with AWS is a plus
- Advanced understanding of modern web app architecture and web fundamentals.
- Intermediate to advanced understanding of developer tooling and unit test writing.
- Experience with incorporating and working with REST API’s.
- Intermediate to advanced understanding of relational databases.
- On top of your technical skills, you are excited to work in a collaborative and inclusive environment that supports continued improvement through code reviews and feedback.
- You take pride in your ability to identify missing requirements early in the development cycle, create and maintain performant and scalable backend systems, write resilient and testable code, and deliver on sprint commitments.

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Why you’ll love working at Newsela:

- Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

About Newsela:

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

#LI-Remote Final compensation will be determined based on the candidate’s individual skills, qualifications, and experience. Total compensation for this role also includes incentive stock options and benefits.

Base Compensation Range $4,000—$4,500 USD

## About Newsela

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Newsela is an education technology company that provides a content and assessment platform with differentiated, standards-aligned instructional resources for K-12 schools.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series D funding)
- **Headquarters**: New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2013
- **Founders**: Matthew Gross and Dan Cogan-Drew

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Education technology (E-Learning Providers)
- **Target customers**: B2B (U.S. K-12 school districts); teachers and administrators are primary users; also serves individual teachers (freemium model).
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Meaningful classroom learning for every student."

## Products & Services
- **[Newsela ELA](https://newsela.com/)**: Differentiated fiction and nonfiction texts, novel studies, and curriculum complements to support knowledge-rich literacy instruction. (SaaS)
- **[Newsela Social Studies](https://newsela.com/)**: Primary sources, biographies, current events, and interactive multimedia to support critical thinking and diverse perspectives. (SaaS)
- **[Newsela Science](https://newsela.com/)**: Engaging videos, standards-aligned texts, lessons, and activities to support real-world science connections. (SaaS)
- **[Formative by Newsela](https://newsela.com/)**: A real-time instruction and assessment platform that unifies district assessments and delivers standards-aligned insights for administrators and teachers. (SaaS, acquired in 2023)
- **[Newsela Writing / Luna AI](https://newsela.com/)**: AI-powered, rubric-aligned writing feedback delivered in real time to support writing practice across the curriculum. (AI tool)
- **Schoolytics** (acquired): Student data unification platform providing role-based dashboards and actionable insights. (SaaS)
- **Generation Genius** (acquired February 2025): Science and math video content for K-8.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company). Total funding of $172.2M as of 2021.
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of $50M (source: LinkedIn company data). Over 25 million users (students and teachers) and used in ~90% of U.S. K-12 schools.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: TCV (lead Series C & D), Franklin Templeton (lead Series D), Kleiner Perkins (lead Series B), Owl Ventures (lead Series A), NewSchools Venture Fund & Kapor Capital (Seed).
- **Growth Signals**: 12.6% year-over-year headcount growth (to 386 employees); continuous product expansion via acquisitions (Formative, Schoolytics, Generation Genius); launch of Luna AI; 2025 CODiE Awards (Winner for Newsela Writing, Finalist for ELA and Social Studies).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Differentiated content at scale**: Library of 18,000+ texts and videos from 175+ content providers, available at five reading levels – enabling personalized learning without compromising standards alignment.
- **Entrenched in U.S. schools**: 90% of K-12 schools use Newsela, creating a strong network effect and switching costs.
- **Comprehensive product suite**: Covers ELA, social studies, science, formative assessment, and data analytics under one roof, reducing tool fragmentation for districts.
- **AI-powered tools**: Luna AI provides real-time writing feedback, saving teachers time while differentiating instruction.
- **Research-backed efficacy**: ESSA Tier II studies show product accelerates learning in ELA and social studies.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expansion of AI capabilities**: Deeper integration of Luna AI across the product portfolio to automate lesson planning, activity design, and text differentiation.
- **Product integration**: Unifying acquired companies (Formative, Schoolytics, Generation Genius) into a seamless platform for districts.
- **Market penetration**: Growing international presence (currently operating in 13 countries) and deepening relationships with large school districts.
- **Supplemental curriculum leadership**: Positioning Newsela as the go-to source for engaging, standards-aligned supplemental materials across core subjects.

## Why Work Here
- **Fully remote**: Newsela is a fully remote team across the United States with some roles in Latin America.
- **Culture and mission**: Emphasis on work that makes a tangible impact on K-12 education – "inspire a generation of learners, support and empower teachers."
- **Benefits**: Unlimited time off, generous family leave (maternity, paternity, adoption), wellness resources (mind & body discounts, access to world-class medical experts including pet coverage), and learning stipends.
- **Engineering/Product culture**: Open roles for data engineers, analytics engineers, site reliability engineers, and product managers. The company values creative, passionate employees "with quick minds and warm hearts."
- **Growth opportunities**: 30 active job postings across sales, customer success, product, and technology; 12.6% annual headcount growth indicates a scaling organization.

## Sources
1. [newsela.com/careers](https://newsela.com/careers)
2. [newsela.com/company](https://newsela.com/company)
3. [job-boards.greenhouse.io/newsela](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/newsela)
4. [linkedin.com/company/newsela](https://www.linkedin.com/company/newsela)
5. [newsela.com](https://newsela.com/)

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