Senior WordPress / React / GraphQL Engineer

Senior WordPress / React / GraphQL Engineer

Location: Fort Lee, NJ

Type: Contract (W2/C2C)

Role purpose

Own and evolve our premier client//'s digital publishing platform: WordPress CMS and editorial workflows, React-based frontend experiences, and GraphQL APIs consumed by web and mobile clients. The role will build reliable content experiences while supporting live video, subscriptions and entitlements, third-party integrations, performance, accessibility, and production operations.

Core responsibilities

• Develop and maintain custom WordPress themes, plugins, blocks, post types, taxonomies, editorial workflows, and page templates.
• Build reusable, accessible React components and page experiences for article, video, live event, community, hub, and subscription surfaces.
• Design, implement, document, and evolve GraphQL schemas, queries, mutations, resolvers, caching, and API contracts for web and mobile consumers.
• Partner with product, design, editorial, mobile, video, ad-tech, analytics, and platform teams to turn screen-level requirements into scalable content models and APIs.
• Integrate WordPress with external platforms and services, including video/content feeds, identity and entitlement services, comments/community, subscriptions, advertising, analytics, search, image/CDN tooling, and email/notification systems.
• Support live-event and Live Q&A experiences, including content ingest, scheduling, pre-event/live/post-event states, replay handling, cancellation behavior, and promo placement.
• Own production-quality engineering practices: code review, automated tests, CI/CD, release safety, observability, incident diagnosis, rollback planning, and documentation.
• Use WP-CLI and WordPress VIP tooling to diagnose publishing, caching, cron, content-sync, rewrite, and GraphQL-cache issues.
• Work directly with editorial and operations teams to improve CMS usability without compromising system reliability or site performance.

Required experience

• 5+ years of hands-on WordPress engineering experience, including custom plugin and theme development in PHP.
• Strong React and modern JavaScript/TypeScript experience, including component architecture, state/data loading, testing, performance, and accessibility.
• Strong GraphQL experience: schema design, resolver implementation, query performance, caching, authorization, backward-compatible evolution, and API documentation.
• Experience running WordPress at scale, ideally on WordPress VIP or a comparable managed, high-traffic platform.
• Experience integrating WordPress with REST and GraphQL APIs, scheduled jobs/cron, webhooks, third-party content feeds, and cache layers.
• Deep knowledge of WordPress content modeling: custom post types, custom fields/meta, taxonomies, Gutenberg blocks, revision/publishing workflows, redirects, and search/indexing.
• Experience debugging production issues across CMS, frontend, API, caching, and external integrations.
• Strong understanding of web accessibility (WCAG), responsive design, SEO fundamentals, Core Web Vitals, and secure development practices.
• Ability to communicate clearly with non-engineering partners and write maintainable technical documentation.

Strongly preferred

• Media, publishing, streaming, newsroom, or other high-traffic consumer-web experience.
• Live-streaming or VOD integrations, DRM-protected content, identity/authentication, and subscription/entitlement flows.
• Experience with Node.js, build tooling, CI/CD, Docker, cloud services, and observability tooling.
• Experience with Elasticsearch/search, CDN/image optimization, ad-tech, analytics, and community/commenting platforms.
• Experience supporting mobile teams through GraphQL contracts, mocks/schema introspection, versioning, and integration testing.
• Familiarity with performance/load testing and cache invalidation strategies.