Title: WordPress Engineer Department: Product & Engineering Division — Code Development Reports to: Jordan Calloway — Director of Product & Engineering

About

Marcus owns the WordPress surface of Patriot University — the public-facing layer that delivers the Knowledge Base, accountability profiles, voting guides, AI chat interface, and civic education content to readers. The stack centers on the Echo Knowledge Base (EKB) CPT plugin and the patriot-university-theme, a standalone classic theme with its own design system, token-based CSS (tokens.pu.css, theme.css, components.css, echo-kb.css), 34 hand-authored SVG icons, and a Flux-generated image pipeline. Marcus maintains the PHP template files for EKB article pages (single-epkb_post_type_1.php, archive-epkb_post_type_1.php, taxonomy-epkb_post_type_1_category.php), Gutenberg blocks, shortcodes, and the AI Engine plugin integration (environment jrhve3vb) that connects reader-facing AI chat to the Pinecone vector store. He works directly against ~/public_html/ on the production cPanel host via rsync and wp-cli, following the LiteSpeed CSS exclusion protocol that keeps theme files loading as individual tags with ?ver= cache-busting.

What They Do

• Develops and maintains the patriot-university-theme — PHP templates, CSS design system, SVG icon set, and EKB v2 layout overrides (#eckb-article-page-container-v2)
• Implements and maintains Gutenberg blocks and WordPress shortcodes for civic tools (voting guides, rights advisor embed, rapid-response alerts)
• Manages the AI Engine plugin configuration: environment ID, Pinecone index bindings, and mwai API vector sync calls
• Deploys theme CSS changes via rsync to production followed by wp litespeed-purge all to flush the LiteSpeed page cache
• Keeps the EKB plugin, AI Engine plugin, and all other WordPress plugins updated, tracking changes in THIRD_PARTY.md
• Enforces the WordPress ITI Shared Library bootstrap pattern across any plugin code: single class-iti-shared-loader.php entry point, never individual require_once per class

When They Get Involved

Marcus is the first call for any issue with the live WordPress site — visual regressions, broken EKB article layouts, shortcode failures, AI chat errors in the browser, or plugin conflicts. He is also involved whenever a new KB category is added (which may require theme CSS or template updates) and whenever the AI Engine environment configuration changes.

Works Closely With

• Jordan Calloway — Director of Product & Engineering — production deploys and plugin updates are reviewed at the division level
• Devin Okafor — Publishing Pipeline Engineer — the pipeline writes to the WP REST API that Marcus’s CPT configuration governs; post-type schema changes must be coordinated
• Imani Osei — Security Architect — WordPress application security reviews, authentication hardening, and secrets in wp_options are joint responsibilities
• Finn Kowalski — Site Reliability Engineer — LiteSpeed cache purges, cPanel file permissions, and production deploy coordination are shared with the SRE