Senior WordPress Engineer for High-Traffic Publishing Platform

The Sun; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical insurance

Discounted gym memberships

Bikes for Work

60% HarperCollins discount

Maternity/Paternity leave

Job summary

The Sun is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to drive development of its digital publishing platform. You will be a key part of the Sun Content team, building robust WordPress-based CMSs and ensuring high performance for millions of readers.

You will implement secure authentication (SSO with Okta/SAML), integrate third-party APIs, and streamline newsroom workflows with tooling such as Slack. This is a hybrid role with some in-office collaboration in London.

Qualifications

• Expert proficiency in PHP and WordPress core/internals to build scalable enterprise solutions.
• Composer for dependency management, PHPUnit for testing, and Gutenberg block development.
• Experience integrating third-party APIs (Slack, Okta, REST APIs).
• Knowledge of caching mechanisms (Varnish, CDN) and authentication (SAML, SSO).

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain complex WordPress themes and plugins for high-traffic sites, including The Sun.
• Build tools to streamline newsroom operations and publishing workflows.
• Implement and manage secure authentication systems (SSO with Okta and SAML).
• Engineer and migrate syndication feeds and RSS templates for various editions.
• Maintain code quality with PHPUnit testing and Composer for dependencies.

Skills

PHP

WordPress core/internals

Composer

PHPUnit

Gutenberg block development

Slack integration

Tools

Slack

Okta

REST APIs

Varnish/CDN

SAML/SSO

Job description

The Sun is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to drive development of its digital publishing platform. You will be a key part of the Sun Content team, building robust WordPress-based CMSs and ensuring high performance for millions of readers.

You will implement secure authentication (SSO with Okta/SAML), integrate third-party APIs, and streamline newsroom workflows with tooling such as Slack. This is a hybrid role with some in-office collaboration in London.