Senior WordPress SDET

Our client is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services. The company comprises businesses across a range of media, including: digital real estate services, subscription video services in Australia, news and information services and book publishing. Headquartered in New York, company operates primarily in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and its content and other products and services are distributed and consumed worldwide.

Join a large-scale international media and information services organization that reaches millions of consumers worldwide through its diverse portfolio of digital Media products and content platforms. The project focuses on developing and enhancing innovative digital solutions across media, publishing, streaming, and online marketplace services.

We are seeking an innovative and highly skilled Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), WordPress Specialist to join our team, focusing on validating, optimizing, and scaling automated testing frameworks for our mission-critical WordPress platforms and decoupled editorial workflows. The ideal candidate possesses expert-level automated testing skills combined with proven experience within the WordPress ecosystem, and proactively leverages AI tools and principles to enhance the entire QA testing lifecycle, driving delivery velocity, framework stability, and comprehensive documentation.

• Interview process that respects people and their time
• Professional and open IT community
• Internal meet-ups and resources for knowledge sharing
• Time for recovery and relaxation
• Bright online and offline events
• Opportunity to become part of our internal volunteer community

• Framework Ownership & Optimisation: Take full ownership of our current Cypress automation framework, optimizing test suites to ensure they provide high-value, lean, and efficient feedback without bloat across our publishing platforms.
• Headless WordPress Validation: Validate decoupled and headless editorial workflows where WordPress serves as the backend engine for diverse frontend consumers (web, mobile app, news feeds, etc.).
• API & Integration Testing: Design, implement, and execute automated test coverage for REST/GraphQL APIs and manage the validation of complex third-party services integrated into a plugin-based WordPress architecture.
• Root Cause Diagnosis: Diagnose, isolate, and troubleshoot complex system failures, identifying whether issues stem from custom WordPress plugin logic, core WordPress updates, or synchronisation failures between the CMS and the decoupled frontend.
• SDLC Collaboration: Participate comprehensively in the SDLC as the strategic QA partner, working closely with Product Owners and Development teams to assess system functionality, anticipate technical "gotchas", and determine defect severity.
• AI-Enabled Workflow Integration: Proactively integrate and leverage AI-enabled workflows (e.g., in test generation, log analysis, edge-case data synthesis) to accelerate debugging and ensure high test coverage.
• Testability & Documentation Standards: Ensure that code, tests, and ways-of-workingare well-documented, adhering to enterprise standards, and integrating test hooks earlyto bake testability into the development lifecycle.
• Quality & Release Engineering Advocacy: Champion best practices in automated testing (Cypress, Playwright), CI/CD integration, and release engineering by providing automated gates and rigorous reviews to ensure data-driven confidence during code promotion.
• Manual Effort Reduction: Identify repetitive manual testing processes and engineer technical automation solutions to shift the team toward a "continuous testing" model.

        Required

• WordPress Testing Familiarity: Proven and practical experience testing within the WordPress ecosystem, including verifying custom plugin behaviors and validating decoupled or headless CMS configurations.

• Automation Engineering & Tooling: Expert-level proficiency in Cypress (or Playwright), specifically focused on maintaining, enhancing, and optimizing automated test suites.

• API & Integration Validation: Strong technical competency testing REST and GraphQL APIs, managing third-party services, and verifying data flow across distributed stacks.

• Shift-Left & Code Quality Oversight: Demonstrated ability to collaborate with developer teams to integrate test hooks early, ensuring automated coverage is integrated before feature completion.

• Technical Artifact Management: Experience managing, versioning, and maintaining critical testing artifacts (test plans, test reports) within the development history.

  Nice-to-have

• Advanced WordPress Architecture: Deep technical understanding of WordPress core updates, the native hook system, and complex custom plugin logic

• Framework Migration: Proven experience strategically migrating automated test suites from Cypress to Playwright.

• AI Integration & Understanding: Experience utilizing AI utilities as a force-multiplier to analyze test plans, fill coverage gaps, generate edge-case data, or summarize complex logs.

• CI/CD & Release Systems: Familiarity with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI) and providing automated gates for release engineering.

• Publishing Domain Experience: Prior experience testing high-traffic media, newsroom, or content workflows.

  Key Attributes

  Our ideal candidate is someone who:

• Acts as a QA Strategic Partner: Takes full ownership of testing outcomes across the SDLC and collaborates as a peer to make critical decisions on defect severity, risk assessment, and release readiness.

• Proactively Uses AI Tools: Enhances test delivery cycles by treating AI as a primary force-multiplier to accelerate debugging, expand edge-case coverage, and summarize complex systems logs.

• Embraces a "Shift-Left" Strategy: Focuses on managing risk and catching defects during requirements and design phases rather than relying on heavy end-of-cycle manual efforts.