WordPress Engineer · Albuquerque, NM · Available remote
Senior WordPress engineering, without the agency overhead.
I’m Omar Serrano. For 12 years I’ve built and maintained WordPress at scale, for Automattic’s VIP clients and for Sandia National Laboratories. Custom Gutenberg blocks, performance work, and deploy pipelines that stop breaking.
Trusted by teams at
Automattic VIP · Sandia National Laboratories · SAIC · Edgewater Federal Solutions
What I do
Three things, accomplished at a level that many teams may find challenging to support full-time.
Custom Gutenberg Development
Blocks and block themes your editors actually want to use. I build the editorial tooling that lets your team publish without filing a ticket and migrate you off page builders and the classic editor for good.
Performance & Scalability
Slow WordPress is a solvable problem. Caching strategy, MySQL tuning, PHP profiling, and query cleanup, the same work I did for enterprise VIP platforms, with a written report showing what changed and by how much.
CI/CD & Deployment
Releases should be boring. Automated build, test, and deploy pipelines in CircleCi, GitLab, or GitHub Actions — containerized, repeatable, and safe enough that shipping on a Friday stops being a joke.
Also available: Section 508 & accessibility remediation and fractional engineering retainers
Selected results
45 minutes to under 10
Sandia’s Mautic email platform deployed slowly enough that releases got batched and delayed. I reconfigured and optimized the OpenShift Helm charts, cut deploy time by more than 75%, and held 99.9% uptime through the transition. Releases went from a scheduled event to something the team could do whenever they needed to.
60% shorter release cycles
Manual deployment steps were the bottleneck and the source of most production errors. I architected CI/CD workflows in Github Actions and GitLab CI to automate build, test, containerization, and deploy. Release cycles dropped 60% and manual deployment mistakes stopped happening entirely.
CNN, NYPOST, Salesforce
As a Senior Software Engineer on Automattic’s WordPress VIP team, I supported enterprise platforms where downtime is a business event, caching strategy, MySQL optimization, PHP scaling, and root-cause analysis on critical incidents. I also helped build documentation and code demos that taught those teams to write their own custom Gutenberg blocks.
Who I work with
Most of my work falls into four buckets. If you’re in one of them, we’ll probably get along.
Publishers and media teams
High-traffic WordPress where an outage is a business event, not a ticket. I’ve worked on the platforms that can’t go down.
Federal contractors and public-sector teams
Compliance requirements, legacy codebases, and procurement realities. I spent nine years inside that world at Sandia, SAIC, and Edgewater, you won’t have to explain how any of it works.
Agencies
Need a senior WordPress engineer for a project without adding headcount. I work under your process and can stay invisible to your client if that’s what you need.
Startups and small teams
No WordPress specialist in-house and no appetite for rebuilding it in a year. I’ll build it right the first time and document it so your team can run it.
Tell me what’s broken.
Or what you’re building. Thirty minutes, no pitch! I’ll give you my honest read on the problem, and if I’m not the right person for it, I’ll tell you who is.
Prefer email? [email protected]