Aubrey Portwood

As a Senior Developer at Awesome Motive over a three-year period, I helped modernize the AffiliateWP team by introducing smarter development practices, demanding code quality standards, and delivering new, high-impact features—one of which was the company's first practical use of AI inside WordPress.

Each project required balancing long-term maintainability of a legacy codebase while adding new and modern features, ensuring the codebase remained stable while evolving to meet the needs of our customers.

Notable features I developed:

• AI-Driven Affiliate Review
• Affiliate Email Summaries
• Affiliate Groups
• Affiliate Program Directory

The result was a stronger, more modern AffiliateWP—with better processes, higher code quality, and a faster, more consistent rollout of new features each quarter.

The AffiliateWP team reached a new level of efficiency—shipping features at a steady, reliable cadence and delivering updates to customers faster than ever before. The plugin also expanded its reach through new integrations with third-party platforms, reinforcing its position as a dependable, forward-looking affiliate marketing solution.

During my seven years at WebDevStudios, I worked as a Senior WordPress Engineer on large-scale, enterprise-level WordPress projects for clients such as Microsoft and Monster.com

My role focused on solving scalability challenges for high-traffic WordPress sites—architecting stable systems, integrating complex API's, and ensuring strict brand and performance standards.

I worked across both frontend and backend teams, led optimization efforts, and guided key architectural decisions.

• Team Leadership & Architecture
• Enterprise WordPress Development
• Performance & Scalability
• Custom Plugin & Development
• Large Site Migrations
• WordPress VIP
• Headless Websites
• Post-launch Support

Microsoft

While at WebDev, I helped maintain and developed enterprise WordPress solutions for Microsoft's Office 365 and Microsoft DEV Blogs.

One of my key responsibilities was managing "The Mule," a background content-sync system that syndicated posts across a handful of Microsoft properties. The system parsed and reformatted content in a clean, editable structure, while giving editors full control over what was imported or published.

My work focused on improving the reliability, flexibility, and performance of this complex system—keeping it compliant with Microsoft's strict publishing workflows, scalability requirements, and technical standards.

• Automated Content Syndication
• System Reliability & Maintenance
• Editorial Workflow Integration
• Architectural Enhancements

Among these I also developed new features, fixed tough issues, and consulted with Microsoft leadership in order to maintain and improve these projects.

Hiring

I helped lead the Core Web Vitals and performance-engineering efforts for the employer-facing site, hiring.Monster.com.

I helped identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across both the frontend and backend, improving search rankings and user experience overall. This included deep work in Google Search Console, optimizing caching layers with Redis and Memcached, refining PHP-FPM configurations, and working directly with WP Engine's performance engineers.

These optimizations produced measurable gains in load times, responsiveness, and SEO performance—enhancing the site's searchability for sustained rankings—all while Core Web Vitals was new at the time.

• Core Web Vitals Optimization
• Caching Strategy
• Search Console Tracking
• Backend Optimizations

Other projects I contributed to at WebDevStudios:

• Care.com
• Starbucks
• Love Is Respect
• Skype Media
• Roadkill
• Discovery Communications
• Uber
• Newscorp