Senior WordPress Developer (Contractor Role) - #1675583

Salary: Negotiable Day/Hourly Rate

Location: Hybrid – The Mailbox Birmingham

Brand: Sketch Creative

Type: Hybrid Working

Basis: Contract

Job Brief

We’re on the lookout for a Senior WordPress Developer to join us on a 12-month contract at Sketch, a creative agency based in Birmingham’s Mailbox. This is a key role for a confident developer who can hit the ground running on custom WordPress builds with solid back-end experience and some front-end capability.

You’ll be our go-to developer for complex WordPress projects – delivering robust back-end functionality, building custom plugins, and helping to shape technical solutions alongside our design and project teams.

We’re looking for someone who can lead builds, contribute ideas, and own the delivery of high-performing, scalable websites. If you love writing clean code, solving tricky problems, and collaborating with creative minds, you’ll fit right in.

Key Responsibilities

Custom WordPress Development

- Build and maintain bespoke WordPress themes and plugins

- Deliver advanced functionality and third-party integrations

- Tweaking and refining existing sites

- Work closely with UI/UX designers to bring concepts to life

- Own back-end logic, performance, and scalability

- Troubleshooting urgent and non-urgent issues on client sites

Technical Oversight & Client-Facing Support

- Help define technical approaches during scoping

- Represent development in client meetings where required

- Troubleshoot and solve issues across builds

- Support deployment and server setup where needed

Maintenance & Best Practice

- Ensure sites are secure, updated, and optimised

- Maintain internal development standards

- Flag technical risks and proactively offer improvements

Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing

- Partner with PMs, designers, and other developers

- Contribute to internal workflows and tooling

- Share ideas that improve the way we build

Candidate Attributes

Must-Have

- 5+ years’ experience building custom WordPress solutions

- PHP and MySQL mastery

- Experience of using Advanced Custom Fields for front and backend development

- Plugin, theme and child theme development experience

- Experience with using WP Bakery and ideally other page builders

- Understanding and proven ability to use WordPress API’s, actions and filters

- Web security best practices and implementation of secure code

- Solid grasp of HTML, SCSS, CSS, and JavaScript

- Ability to work independently, remotely, and manage your own time

- Understanding of hosting, deployment, and Git workflows- Solid experience troubleshooting technical issues from simple formatting to site down

- Happy diving into WordPress core, plugin and theme code to find answers when required

- Good documentation skills

Nice-to-Have

- WooCommerce experience

- Laravel or React familiarity

- Build tools such as webpack and gulp

- Plesk server management

- WordPress coding standards

- Performance and security optimisation knowledge

- Google page speed performance analysis and metrics

- Diagnosis and repair of malware-infected WordPress sites

- Comfortable speaking with clients on technical matters

About Sketch

We’re a creative agency with a down-to-earth, ambitious team working across websites, branding, and digital campaigns. Our dev team is small, skilled, and trusted to get on with doing great work.

We value flexibility, collaboration, and craftsmanship, and we want you to feel part of that whether you’re in the office or working remotely.