Senior WordPress Engineer Needed for High-Traffic Automotive Publishing Site Rebuild & Migration

We’re looking for an experienced senior WordPress developer/engineer to help rebuild and migrate a growing automotive news and media publication. Experience building publishing or other content-heavy editorial websites is extremely important for this project. We are not looking for someone whose experience is primarily brochure sites, landing pages, or page builders. We're a newer publication that is seeing strong growth through Google Discover and organic search. We want to move the site onto infrastructure we control while creating a faster, cleaner, and more scalable foundation for future growth. We want to build a modern WordPress publishing platform focused on: Excellent Core Web Vitals and page speed Google Discover and technical SEO High-traffic scalability Clean article and editorial architecture Simple workflows for writers and editors Minimal plugin and JavaScript bloat Strong caching/CDN implementation Clean, maintainable code Long-term flexibility and ownership of the platform Custom WordPress vs. GeneratePress We have not yet decided whether the new site should use a completely custom WordPress theme or a lightweight framework such as GeneratePress that is heavily customized. We are looking for an engineer who can help us make that architectural decision. We are not interested in building something custom simply for the sake of it. If GeneratePress or another lightweight foundation gives us nearly the same performance and flexibility with better maintainability, we are open to that approach. Likewise, if a custom theme provides meaningful advantages for a publishing site of this type, we'd like to understand why. Relevant experience Ideally, you have strong experience with: High-traffic WordPress publishing/news/media sites Large article libraries Custom WordPress theme development Gutenberg/native WordPress blocks PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS Core Web Vitals/performance optimization Cloudflare, CDN and caching architecture Technical SEO NewsArticle/Article schema and structured data Canonicals, XML sitemaps and taxonomy architecture Google Discover considerations WordPress migrations with minimal SEO impact Git/version control Development, staging and production workflows Database and object caching optimization Building reusable editorial components Experience with GeneratePress is a plus, but strong WordPress engineering and publishing experience is more important. Migration The existing site has established content, URLs, rankings and Discover traffic, so the migration needs to be handled carefully. We need to retain and correctly migrate things such as: Articles and media Existing URLs Authors/bylines Categories and tags Publication/update dates SEO metadata Canonicals Structured data Redirects Internal linking Existing search equity What we'd like from applicants Please include examples of publishing, news, magazine, or high-traffic content websites you've personally worked on. It would also be helpful if you briefly explain: Whether you would lean toward a custom WordPress theme or a lightweight foundation such as GeneratePress for this project. How you would approach performance and Core Web Vitals. How you would approach migrating an established publication while minimizing SEO/Google Discover risk. Your experience building scalable WordPress infrastructure for traffic spikes. The goal is not to create the most complicated WordPress site possible. We want a world-class automotive publication with a fast, clean, scalable, and maintainable engineering foundation underneath it.