Senior WordPress Engineer - Headless

The Focus of the Role :

Motorcycle News, Grazia Daily, Today’s Golfer, Empire Online and Parkers are some of the high-profile web applications published by Bauer Consumer Media, the digital publishing arm of the global Bauer Media Group.

We’re seeking a Senior Engineer with deep experience in headless WordPress for enterprise-scale systems. Strong backend and API skills are essential.

You'll be designing and developing systems that marshal data from numerous sources, organise and publish that data in many ways and that fire events that are consumed by further internal applications and external event consumers. You'll be working with a slick development lifecycle, with continuous integration and deployment having the highest priority, and you'll be part of our ongoing push towards having everything as code.

In addition to working with local UK-based teams, there will also be the opportunity to work with engineering teams distributed across Bauer’s European territories as we build our next generation web platform to service Bauer’s digital ambitions.

The location of this role can be Peterborough / London based, and whilst it is a hybrid role there is flexibility in location, providing you would be able to attend the office at least once every 4 – 6 weeks.

Key Technical Skills :

• Advanced PHP (7 / 8) and WordPress core development.
• Custom themes / plugins optimized for headless use.
• REST API & WPGraphQL : Creation, extension, and integration.
• Content modeling : ACF, CPTs, taxonomies.
• Authentication & Security : OAuth, JWT, secure API handling.
• Performance : Query optimization, caching (object / page), CDN strategies.
• DevOps : Git, CI / CD, Docker-based local environments.
• Frontend integration : Delivering clean APIs for React / or similar frameworks.
• JAMstack familiarity : API-first design, serverless functions, modern deployment pipelines.

This is a hands-on, code-focused role - driving clean, scalable headless builds.