Job Description

Senior Engineer (WordPress)

Location: dmg::media Headquarters - London

Position: Permanent/Hybrid - London required for first week and on occasion for team meet-ups.

Package Description

Our benefits package increases the longer you've been with us. Here's what to expect:


25 days' holiday (increasing by 1 per year up to a total of 30) Upon joining you will be automatically enrolled onto the Pension Plan at the minimum level of 5% employee contribution, 3% Company contribution. Life cover under the Pension Plan of up to 3x your basic salary. DMGT Discounts (for discounts on online shopping, vouchers and reloadable cards) Subsidised canteen Onsite gym (Northcliffe House only) Onsite nurse and GP clinics (Northcliffe House only) Our Employee Assistance Programme Discounted dining cards




Plus many other benefits....

About the Role

DMG Media is seeking experienced Senior Engineers to join our distributed development team, responsible for delivering new features, functionality, and ongoing maintenance across our enterprise-level WordPress sites, native app integrations, and supporting services for the Harmsworth Media brands: New Scientist and The i Paper.



As a Senior Engineer, you will be part of a newly formed team during a pivotal period of transformation and standardisation across our digital estate. We are actively modernising and streamlining our platforms to improve scalability, performance, and maintainability, with a focus on reducing duplication of effort and overall complexity across our applications and services. You'll collaborate closely with QA engineers in a team culture that encourages innovation, ownership, and continuous improvement.



You will primarily focus on the development and ongoing improvement of Harmsworth Media's portfolio of digital products. As part of your role, you will also contribute to shared services and processes that support and benefit Harmsworth Media and its sister brands at DMG Media, helping to drive consistency across the greater organisation.



Our dynamic and adaptable structure empowers engineers to build purposeful, effective software, free from the constraints often found in traditional enterprise environments.



This is a hybrid role, with the option to work from our Kensington, London offices.

Main Responsibilities

Maintain and develop new features for our enterprise-level WordPress properties: New Scientist and The i Paper Contribute to and maintain shared plugins for all DMG Media's WordPress properties Develop and maintain microservices and JavaScript libraries/applications that are independent of, but co-exist with our WordPress brands Work-alongside and support our vendors and partners in delivering products and services to support out digital portfolio Monitor and improve response times, database query times and core web vital scores. Participate in discussions about technology choices based on business value, scalability, maintainability and project delivery performance Independently prioritize and manage work with little direction, while adhering to project timelines in a fast-paced environment Debug and troubleshoot issues raised by our editorial and support staff

Person Specification

Required


8+ years of experience with WordPress development Excellent understanding of the WordPress and Gutenberg ecosystem and development best practices Experience in creating custom Gutenberg blocks, custom RSS feeds, and WP-JSON API endpoints. Expertise with modern performant HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP Expertise with front end JavaScript and React Strong understanding of Git and VCS principles. Knowledge of Agile methodology and project planning tools like JIRA Capability to individually see a non-WordPress microservice project from beginning to end Understanding and knowledge of Core Web Vitals and their importance Understanding and knowledge of Edge and object Caching and WP Query optimization Knowledge and use of WP-Cron, WP-CLI and creation of custom commands Excellent communication skills owing to a remote role within a distributed development team. Good understanding of how to use Chrome DevTools to debug issues on the front end Be a strong problem-solver.

Desirable Skills


Experience with the WordPress VIP platform Experience with the PugPig platform Enterprise experience of building WordPress at scale Knowledge of monitoring tools such as New Relic and Kibana Experience with Typescript / Webpack Experience with Symfony and Twig. Integrating and using AWS services (S3, Lambda, EC2, API Gateway) Knowledge and experience of developing for and publishing to Apple News and Apple News + Knowledge and use of CI tools such as CircleCI, GitHub Actions and TeamCity Experience writing bash or python scripts on an ad-hoc basis Experience with automated testing for PHP and JS with PHPUnit, Behat and Playwright Familiarity or experience with integrating subscription experience platforms such as Piano.io or Zephr Willingness to travel to London for occasional team meet-ups.

About dmg::media

"dmg media's brands deliver highly engaging, trusted content to millions of loyal customers around the globe, 24-hours a day, seven days a week. The Mail brand reaches one in two Brits every month and is officially the best-read, most recognised, most engaged newsbrand in the country.*


Together, Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, MailOnline, Mail+, Metro, Metro.co.uk, i and inews.co.uk reach more than 10.1m people daily in the UK.*


Globally, dmg media's brands reach 190M unique browsers every month across its domains and apps.


Our newsbrands maintain an unwavering commitment to uncovering the stories that matter most to our readers, ensuring that we remain experts at delivering relevant and insightful content.


In October, the Mail became the largest news publisher on TikTok with over 7- million followers.




PAMCo H2 2023*


GA 2023 September"

Our Commitment

We are committed to increasing diversity and maintaining an inclusive workplace culture. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability.



We are Disability Confident Committed. Please let us know if you require any recruitment documentation in other formats or if you require reasonable adjustments to be made during the recruitment process. Please be assured that any such information will be held separately to your recruitment application and will not be considered as part of the selection process.