Senior WordPress Engineer - Headless

Senior WordPress Engineer – Headless

Location: Manchester (Hybrid, occasional office visits, once a month)

Full-time, Permanent

£60,000 – £65,000

I'm currently working with a leading digital media group that's investing heavily in their web platform and they’re looking for a Senior WordPress Engineer with serious backend skills, particularly in headless WordPress at scale.

This is a genuinely exciting opportunity to get stuck into building out high-traffic, content-heavy sites that are powered by clean, scalable architecture and modern development practices. It’s not your average WordPress gig, think API-first, JAMstack, CI/CD pipelines, and containerised environments – all the good stuff.

You'll be part of a growing, forward-thinking team where engineering standards are high, DevOps is a given, and everything is built with performance and security front of mind. This is a hands-on, code-focused role where your experience with custom plugins, GraphQL, REST APIs, and advanced PHP will be key to shaping robust, reusable services across multiple sites and teams.

There’s also a strong collaborative element here, you'll be working closely with other engineers across the UK and Europe as they roll out the next generation of their platform.

What you’ll need to bring:

• Strong experience in headless WordPress development (enterprise-level experience is ideal)
• Deep PHP knowledge (7/8) and understanding of the WordPress core
• Hands-on experience creating and integrating with REST APIs and WPGraphQL
• Custom theme/plugin development optimised for headless use
• ACF, CPTs, taxonomies – you know the drill
• Secure API handling (OAuth, JWT) and best practices in authentication
• Solid grasp of performance optimisation – query tuning, caching, CDN strategies
• Familiarity with Docker, Git, and modern CI/CD pipelines
• Confidence in delivering clean, frontend-ready APIs (React, Next.js or similar)
• JAMstack know-how and a passion for scalable, API-first design

Location & Working Setup:

The team is mainly based in London, Peterborough or Manchester, but this role is open to hybrid/remote working, with a touchpoint in the office around once every 4–6 weeks.

If you're an experienced WordPress engineer who’s passionate about headless builds, modern architecture, and writing clean, reliable code, this could be a great fit.