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 clients 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 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.

Required Skills: