WordPress Infrastructure Engineer

We are a high-traffic digital news media company seeking an experienced WordPress infrastructure engineer to migrate our current hosting to a new bare metal environment and provide ongoing, as-needed support.

This is not a full-time position. The engagement will begin with a migration project and transition into ongoing on-call and troubleshooting support where uptime is critical.

Scope of Work
Migrate existing WordPress hosting to two bare metal servers
Configure network load balancing and high availability
Configure and optimize Cloudflare (DNS, caching, WAF, security rules)
Set up and maintain production and staging environments
Install and configure Linux servers and web stack (Nginx/Apache, PHP-FPM, MySQL/MariaDB)
Optimize WordPress performance for high traffic
Troubleshoot WordPress core, plugin, and theme issues
Perform database optimization and query tuning
Implement automated backups, monitoring, and alerting
Provide on-call support for outages or urgent performance issues

Required Expertise
Proven experience managing high-traffic WordPress sites
Strong Linux system administration skills
Experience with bare metal servers
Load balancing and high-availability architecture
Cloudflare configuration and optimization
MySQL/MariaDB performance tuning
Ability to respond quickly during critical incidents

Nice to Have
Experience supporting news or media websites
WordPress security hardening
Monitoring tools (uptime, performance, server health)
Documentation and infrastructure diagramming

Engagement Details
Contract / independent contractor
Initial migration project + ongoing support
Hourly or retainer-based compensation
Long-term relationship possible