Senior Engineer, MSNBC

We’re looking for a highly skilled and motivated Senior Engineer to join our MSNBC Digital Technology team, focused on delivering high-quality, high-performance experiences across our content management and publishing applications. This role is ideal for someone passionate about clean architecture, scalable development, and building best-in-class user experiences across WordPress and React platforms. As a Senior Engineer, you’ll partner closely with product, design, backend, video, and enablement teams to evolve our publishing stack, drive architectural decisions, and ensure our platforms are secure, performant, and maintainable. You’ll lead by example in writing robust code, mentoring developers, and contributing to engineering practices that keep MSNBC Digital at the forefront of media technology. Responsibilities Build and maintain high-quality features across a WordPress (PHP) + React stack (e.g., Next.js, Gutenberg blocks). Debug effectively across PHP and JS (Query Monitor, WP-CLI, Chrome DevTools, logs) to identify root causes. Conduct timely, constructive code reviews and uphold engineering best practices. Partner with Product/Design to translate requirements into technical plans and well-scoped tickets. Make pragmatic build/buy decisions (custom plugin vs. vetted plugin, block theme vs. classic, headless vs. coupled). Design and implement custom plugins, CPTs/taxonomies, block patterns/blocks, and WP-CLI scripts. Build headless experiences using WPGraphQL/REST; integrate React data layers (React Query/Redux) and SSR/SSG/ISR where appropriate. Optimize performance and Core Web Vitals via caching layers (object cache Redis/Memcached, page cache, CDN), query tuning, asset splitting, and image strategies (lazy-load, responsive). Enforce security best practices (capabilities/roles, nonces, sanitization/escaping, prepared statements, dependency hygiene). Write clear, tested code (PHPUnit for PHP; Jest/React Testing Library/Playwright for JS) and maintain useful docs. Ship reliably with CI/CD (GitHub/GitLab, Composer/npm, Docker) and monitor with tools like New Relic/Sentry. Advocate for accessibility, SEO, analytics/A/B testing, and continuous improvement of tooling.