About The Ad Firm

Founded in 2009,

The Ad Firm was born out of a mission to bring complete transparency, scientific performance, and high profitability to the digital marketing industry. Headquartered in Carlsbad, CA, we specialize in SEO, PPC, social media management, and custom web design for small and medium-sized businesses.

We maintain a 5.0-star employee rating on Glassdoor because of our immense focus on professional growth, training support, and goal-oriented incentives. As we scale into 2026, we are expanding our tech stack. We need a dual-threat engineer who can reliably build and maintain client websites while simultaneously stepping up to help us pioneer and experiment with next-generation, autonomous AI agentic workflows.

Job Summary

We are seeking a versatile Web Developer & AI Automation Engineer to join our team. In this hybrid role, you will wear two hats. First, you will act as a core web developer, building high-performance, SEO-optimized websites, managing integrations, and maintaining clean codebase structures for our clients. Second, you will act as our junior AI specialist—helping us explore, build, and test Agentic AI Workflows that automate digital marketing pipelines (like automated content generation, ad auditing, and reporting loops).

This is the ultimate role for an established developer who wants to break heavily into AI and build hands-on experience with multi-agent systems, frameworks like LangGraph/CrewAI, and frontier LLMs under the guidance of our strategic roadmap.

About the Role

Own the technical foundation of the websites we build
Architect, develop, and optimize custom builds for SEO, performance, and scalability
Work closely with SEO, Content, and Digital PR teams to ensure strong technical execution
Build systems that are clean, scalable, and maintainable
Focus on engineering quality over page builders or pre-built themes

Key Responsibilities

Web Development (Core Role)

Architect and build fully custom WordPress websites (themes, plugins, ACF-driven structures)
Engineer sites for speed, scalability, and strong Core Web Vitals performance
Handle server environments, deployments, and infrastructure decisions
Integrate APIs and third-party systems cleanly and reliably
Own technical SEO implementation (crawlability, indexation, structured data)
Manage DNS, CDN (Cloudflare), SMTP, and hosting configurations
Work across Shopify and BigCommerce at the code level when needed
Implement accurate tracking (GA4, GTM) without compromising data integrity
Debug issues across the full stack (server, backend, frontend performance)

Agentic AI Workflows (Junior/Growth Role)

Assist in constructing multi-step, dynamic agentic workflows utilizing the PTMRO framework (Planning, Tools, Memory, Reflection, Orchestration).
Help connect AI agents to practical tools by writing scripts and utilizing web hooks to link LLMs with marketing APIs (Google Ads, Meta Graph API, analytics dashboards).
Build and test simple evaluation loops, helping prompt engineering and agent behaviors self-correct or flag errors before output generation.
Run experiments to optimize LLM token usage, latency, and agent reasoning structures for internal agency automation.

What We’re Looking For

Web Development Requirements (Mid-to-Senior)

5+ years of web development experience in agency or performance-driven environments
Deep expertise in PHP (including WordPress core-level development)
Strong JavaScript experience with modern frameworks and tooling
Working knowledge of Python (automation, scraping, tooling)
Proven experience building custom WordPress websites from scratch
Strong understanding of technical SEO and its impact on architecture and performance
Ability to diagnose and solve full-stack issues independently

AI & Automation Requirements (Junior / Entry-Level)

Foundational AI Knowledge: A massive passion for AI agents and basic conceptual understanding of how LLMs process data, handle memory, and leverage external tools.
Framework Exposure: Foundational exposure to or an eager willingness to learn agentic architectures like LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or Semantic Kernel (personal projects or bootcamps count!).
Python Skills: Solid script-writing capabilities in Python to handle data manipulation and API calls.

What Sets You Apart

You think in systems, not pages
Experience working on large-scale or SEO-heavy websites
Strong understanding of crawlability, indexation, and internal linking at scale
Experien

Web Developer & AI Automation Engineer at The Ad Firm