The role
Wilkes & Liberty needs a Senior Drupal Engineer who treats the content management system as an operational platform, not a collection of pages. You will translate editorial, program, security, and integration needs into durable content models, workflows, APIs, and code that client teams can understand and extend.
What you will own
- Design and implement Drupal content architecture, entity and field models, editorial workflows, permissions, reusable components, and custom modules.
- Build and maintain GraphQL, JSON:API, and integration contracts for decoupled frontends and external systems, including preview and unpublished-content workflows where required.
- Plan safe configuration, schema, data, and content migrations with update paths, rollback awareness, and validation tied to the exact deployed state.
- Diagnose and improve caching, queues, search, indexing, rendering, and database behavior without weakening correctness or editorial control.
- Keep authentication, authorization, file handling, input validation, dependency maintenance, and audit behavior explicit at the Drupal boundary.
- Write automated coverage for custom behavior, review contributed-module risk, and work upstream when a shared fix belongs in the Drupal ecosystem.
- Produce field references, architecture records, release evidence, and operator-facing runbooks that let the client maintain the platform after handoff.
- Work directly with client operators during discovery and delivery when serving in a forward-deployed assignment.
What you bring
- You have delivered and maintained modern Drupal systems using PHP, Symfony components, Composer, configuration management, and Drupal's entity, plugin, queue, cache, and access APIs.
- You can model complex editorial and publishing needs without turning every requirement into one-off code.
- You understand how Drupal configuration, database updates, content migrations, and deployment sequencing interact, and you design changes that fail loudly when safety assumptions are not met.
- You can design stable API contracts and collaborate with frontend, backend, search, identity, QA, and infrastructure engineers across system boundaries.
- You review code and configuration for security, accessibility, maintainability, and operational behavior, not only whether the happy path renders.
- You communicate tradeoffs plainly and leave behind tested code and usable documentation rather than undocumented platform knowledge.
Helpful experience
- Drupal 10 or 11, custom and contributed module maintenance, Drupal.org issue workflows, GraphQL Compose, JSON:API, and decoupled preview.
- Headless Drupal with Next.js or another independent frontend, including localization, caching, SEO metadata, and accessible editorial output.
- Solr, Typesense, or comparable search integrations; high-volume content migration; multisite or reusable distributions.
- Containers, continuous integration, secure file intake, and federal or regulated environments where Section 508, audit evidence, and controlled change matter.
Equal opportunity and accommodations. Wilkes & Liberty considers qualified candidates without regard to protected characteristics. Reasonable accommodations are available during the application process.