Technical Operations Lead (Web Operations and Security)

TECHNICAL OPERATIONS LEAD (WEB OPERATIONS & SECURITY)
Fractional · Fully remote

ABOUT THE ROLE

You keep every website merabi touches online, secure, fast, and correctly configured, and you catch problems before our clients or we do. You also implement our SEO and AI visibility specifications on those sites. You do not set that strategy.

About 70% of this role is infrastructure, security, and development. The rest is implementing search and AI visibility work. If you are an SEO specialist who does some server work, this is not your role. If you are a backend or web operations person who understands how search and AI crawlers read a site, it is.

merabi is a B2B content marketing agency. We manage websites for clients across several industries. Our stack is WordPress (WPBakery, Salient, Yoast), WP Engine, Google Search Console and GA4, ClickUp, and Google Workspace.

WHAT YOU’LL OWN

Primary: keeping sites running and secure

• Uptime and error monitoring, spotting problems before clients report them
• Security: hosting and cloud hardening, access control, plugin vulnerability management, malware remediation, recovery after a compromise
• Maintenance: core, theme and plugin updates, backups and restore testing, staging environments, Core Web Vitals
• Development: new client site builds, ongoing changes and fixes on live sites
• Incident response: you are the person who fixes it when a site goes down, gets hacked, or breaks after an update
• Internal IT: tooling, access management, credential hygiene across a small remote team

Secondary: implementing our search and AI visibility specifications

• Google Search Console across client properties: index coverage, sitemaps, crawl errors
• Site hygiene: redirects, canonicals, broken links, making sure every page resolves and indexes as intended
• Structured data: deploying the JSON-LD we specify, validating it, fixing what fails
• AI visibility: robots.txt permissions for AI crawlers, verifying pages render for them, monitoring AI referral traffic

We write the SEO, GEO and AEO strategy in house. You implement it, tell us when something we’ve specified won’t work technically, and confirm it is live.

REQUIREMENTS

• Hands-on professional WordPress administration: hosting, staging, migrations, updates, backups, plugin conflicts
• Web and server security: hardening, access control, malware cleanup, recovery from a compromised site
• Development capable of new builds, not just maintenance
• Comfortable owning incident response, including the judgment to escalate versus fix quietly
• Working proficiency in Google Search Console
• Able to read a specification, implement it exactly, and confirm it worked

Working knowledge is enough:

• How indexing, canonicalization and redirects affect search visibility
• Schema and JSON-LD: deploying and validating it, following our strategy
• How AI crawlers and AI search surfaces read a site, and what blocks them
• Core Web Vitals and page performance

Nice to have: SEO strategy, keyword research, copywriting, client-facing account management.

WHAT MAKES SOMEONE GREAT IN THIS ROLE

• You catch things before we do. The single most valuable trait here is noticing a problem on a client site before the client or we notice it.
• You document what you change.
• You are direct about what is broken, including when we are the ones who broke it.

THE ENGAGEMENT

• Fractional, ongoing monthly retainer. Not a project, not full-time employment.
• Starting at 20 hours per month, scaling to 30 or 40 as our client roster grows
• Up to 10 additional hours per month for incidents and unplanned work, approved in advance, billed only when used
• First month around 45 hours, to complete the site inventory and security baseline
• New client website builds and major rebuilds sit outside the retainer and are scoped and quoted per project
• Rate: tell us your hourly rate when you apply
• Fully remote
• Reachable for critical incidents outside normal hours. We are not asking for 24/7 on-call, but a client site down over a weekend needs a response.
• You work directly with Jessica, and with Ana, who handles technical implementation on the content side

YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS

• Inventory every site we manage: hosting, access, backup status, plugin and update state, known issues
• Apply a security baseline across the portfolio: access control, tested backups, known vulnerabilities closed
• Document an incident response path with agreed response times
• Clear Search…