Senior Software Engineer - Wordpress

Job Description Your Team:

The Sun is one of the UK’s strongest brands and, like all media organisations, is having to adapt rapidly to overcome the uncertainties of a fast-moving digital world. Our website The Sun is more than a newspaper. It is an instigator, an entertainer, a cultural reference point, a finger on the pulse, a daily relationship. We work to empower our engineers so that they feel ownership over the products to help drive them, and the standards they are built against, forwards and actively encourage feedback and ideas from within the team to do this.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to drive the development of The Sun’s digital publishing platform. You will be a key part of the Sun Content team, enhancing the editorial experience, building robust integrations, and ensuring the high performance of our Word Press-based content management systems which serve millions of readers.

• Develop and maintain complex Word Press themes and plugins for high-traffic sites, including The Sun.

• Build tools to streamline newsroom operations, such as integrating Slack for publishing workflows and automated author attribution.

• Implement and manage secure authentication systems, including Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions using Okta and SAML across different digital editions.

• Optimise application performance through advanced caching strategies, creating custom MU-plugins to manage Cache-Control headers for CDNs and browsers.

• Engineer and migrate syndication feeds, such as custom RSS templates for Google Newsstand and Tabloid integration.

• Maintain exceptional code quality through PHPUnit testing, dependency management via Composer.

• Primary
  
  Languages:
  
  Expert proficiency in PHP and Word Press core/internals to build scalable enterprise solutions.

• Frameworks & Tools:
  Deep experience with Composer for dependency management, PHPUnit for testing, and Gutenberg block development.

• Integrations:
  Proven track record of integrating third-party APIs (Slack, Okta, REST APIs).

• Infrastructure:
  Knowledge of caching mechanisms (Varnish, CDN), authentication protocols (SAML, SSO), and enterprise-grade architecture.

If you think you have what it takes but don’t tick every requirement on the list, we recognise that considering someone’s potential as well as their experience is a great way to hire. We want to hear from people who have a passion to learn and develop.

News UK is one of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland. Our news brands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local stations across Ireland. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month.

Spanning print and pixel, audio and video, events and experiences, our multi-format brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose, we exist to promote a fair society, freedom of speech and a little bit of fun. Rethinking continually the business of storytelling, we represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter.

At News UK, we embrace a hybrid work model, currently requiring a minimum of three days per week in the office. This approach fosters collaboration, innovation, and team spirit within our workspace. Certain roles may necessitate additional in-office days; please discuss this with your recruiter for specific requirements.

Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose. We represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter. We inform our audiences so that they can make decisions based on trusted information.

We represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter most. To ensure these stories resonate with as broad an audience as possible, it is essential that our organisation reflects the diversity of the people we reach. Whether through age, gender, ethnicity, disability, social class…