Project: Agency Catalog platform rebuild (data-driven agency discovery platform)

We are looking for an experienced freelance WordPress developer to support the development and scaling of our Agency Catalog — a platform that helps businesses discover, evaluate, and connect with digital marketing agencies.
The current catalog contains 700+ agency listings across 5 languages and will be rebuilt as a standalone platform on a subdomain, evolving into a data-driven, SEO-first marketplace built on structured data and scalable architecture.

The new platform will include:

• Frontend dashboards for agency owners without wp-admin access
• Self-service profile editing and moderation
• Multi-level AJAX filtering with SEO-friendly URLs
• Agency comparison
• Async rating system integrated with an external API
• Full multilingual data and SEO migration

What you’ll do

• Review the existing codebase and propose the target architecture
• Build custom WordPress plugins and frontend functionality
• Implement responsive layouts based on Figma designs
• Build user dashboards, roles, permissions, and ownership logic
• Implement filters, comparison, multilingual routing, and API workflows
• Test critical functionality and support the production launch

What we’re looking for

• 4+ years of custom WordPress development
• Strong PHP and object-oriented programming skills
• Strong knowledge of CPTs, taxonomies, users, roles, capabilities, WP_Query, and WordPress APIs
• Advanced ACF Pro experience
• Strong HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills
• Experience implementing responsive Figma designs
• Experience building frontend dashboards and custom REST API endpoints
• Strong understanding of WordPress security, permissions, validation, sanitization, and escaping
• Experience with Polylang or WPML
• Experience building AJAX filters with URL synchronization
• Experience integrating external APIs and handling background jobs
• Strong understanding of frontend performance and Core Web Vitals
• Experience migrating WordPress content, taxonomies, media, translations, SEO metadata, and redirects
• Strong Git skills and comfort with pull requests and code reviews

There is no dedicated QA engineer, so testing and production readiness are part of the developer’s responsibility.

Nice to have

• Composer, namespaces, and autoloading
• Tailwind CSS
• ACF JSON sync
• Action Scheduler
• Experience with retries, idempotency, and failure logging
• WP-CLI and custom migration commands
• PHPUnit, Playwright, or Cypress
• Redis or persistent object caching
• Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Algolia
• Experience with multilingual directories or marketplaces