The Role
We are looking for a WordPress developer who treats WordPress as an application platform, not just a CMS for brochure sites. The WordPress work here goes well beyond installing themes and configuring plugins. You will build custom plugins that extend WordPress in ways the ecosystem does not support out of the box, develop REST API extensions that let WordPress communicate with external systems, and solve performance challenges on sites that handle significant traffic and complex content architectures.
The flagship WordPress project is the WP Beacon Plugin — a commercial product that connects WordPress sites to the Beacon ecosystem for AI-driven growth automation. Building and extending this plugin is a substantial part of the role. It involves custom post type architectures, REST API endpoint development, admin interface design, and integration with external APIs that process data and return structured results. This is plugin development at the level where you are thinking about backwards compatibility, update mechanisms, multi-site support, and performance impact on the host site.
Beyond the plugin, you will work on client WordPress projects — custom themes with advanced content modelling, WooCommerce customisations for e-commerce businesses that have outgrown the standard setup, and performance optimisation for sites where loading speed directly affects revenue. The clients we work with have WordPress sites that are genuinely business-critical, not side projects, which means the quality bar is higher than what most WordPress roles demand.
What the Day-to-Day Looks Like
A typical week might include extending the Beacon plugin’s content analysis system with a new endpoint that communicates with the Dashboard API, building a custom Gutenberg block for a client site that pulls live data from their CRM, optimising database queries on a WooCommerce site where the product catalogue has grown to the point where admin screens are timing out, and reviewing a theme update to ensure it does not break the custom functionality layered on top. The variety keeps the work interesting, but the consistent thread is that everything needs to be production-ready and maintainable by someone other than you.
You will work alongside the Laravel and React teams, since the Beacon plugin communicates with a Laravel backend and some client projects use WordPress as a content layer with a React frontend consuming the REST API. Understanding how WordPress fits into a larger system architecture — not just how it works in isolation — is important.
What We Are Looking For
Required:
- Deep WordPress knowledge — custom plugin development, custom post types, taxonomies, meta boxes, and the WordPress REST API. Not just theme customisation
- Strong PHP fundamentals independent of WordPress — you understand object-oriented PHP, not just the WordPress way of doing things
- Experience building custom REST API endpoints in WordPress and consuming external APIs from within plugins
- Performance awareness — understanding query optimisation, caching strategies (object cache, transients, page cache), and how to diagnose and fix slow WordPress sites
- Ability to write clean, documented code that follows WordPress coding standards and can be maintained by other developers
Valuable but not required:
- Experience building commercial WordPress plugins (distributed to users, not just bespoke client work)
- Familiarity with Gutenberg block development (React-based)
- WooCommerce development experience, particularly custom checkout flows and product data extensions
- Understanding of WordPress multi-site architecture
- Experience with WordPress VIP or enterprise-scale WordPress hosting environments
- Familiarity with build tools (Webpack, Vite) for compiling plugin assets
What We Offer
- Product development — the WP Beacon Plugin is a commercial product, not a client project. You build features that ship to hundreds of installations, with the engineering rigour that requires
- Technical depth — this is WordPress development at the application level: REST APIs, external integrations, performance engineering, and plugin architecture. Not page builders and theme options
- Cross-stack collaboration — work with Laravel and React teams on systems where WordPress is one component of a larger architecture
- Remote flexibility — UK-based, remote-first, with flexibility around core hours
- Direct impact — small team, your code ships to production, and you see how users interact with it
- Growing ecosystem — the Beacon plugin is actively expanding, with new capabilities planned that push WordPress integration further than most developers have taken it
How to Apply
Send an email to careers@digitalroyalty.co.uk with your CV and a note on what interests you about this role. If you have plugins in the WordPress repository, GitHub projects, or client work you can share, include it — practical evidence of how you build things tells us more than a technology list. We do not use recruitment agencies.
The process: an initial conversation, a practical exercise that reflects real plugin development work, and a final discussion about the role. No trick questions or abstract challenges.