Senior Web Engineer – WordPress, React & GraphQL

Senior WordPress / React / GraphQL EngineerLocation: Fort Lee, NJType: Contract (W2/C2C)Role purposeOwn 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 responsibilitiesDevelop 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 experience5+ 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 preferredMedia, 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.