CMS Sanity Backend Engineer

TEKsystems•Philadelphia, PA

5d•Remote

About The Position

TEKsystems is looking for a Backend Engineer or Architect with experience with a CMS migration to Sanity.io. This is a remote contract opportunity through the end of 2026. The rate is open to $85/hr - $90/hr for the right candidate. Role Overview We are looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to help guide the technical evolution of our omnichannel digital commerce platforms, with a specific focus on our Content Management System (CMS) strategy. In this role, you will bridge the gap between transactional commerce services and rich, dynamic content delivery across web, mobile, and in-store channels. The ideal candidate is an expert in Sanity.io and Structured Content, capable of designing cloud-native, scalable services that power millions of customer interactions. This position requires a strategic architect who remains deeply technical—spending 75% of their time in the codebase—to ensure our content architecture is as resilient and high-performing as our commerce engine.

Requirements

Deep experience with Sanity.io (preferred), Contentful, or similar headless platforms.
Expert-level knowledge of GROQ.
Proficiency in Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Strong proficiency in Java/Kotlin (Node.js/TypeScript is a major plus given the CMS context).
Expertise in RESTful design, microservices architecture, and event-driven systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes, and Harness/Jenkins.
Familiarity with Portable Text and JSON-LD standards.
Understanding of how backend content architecture impacts Next.js, React, or mobile (Flutter) performance.

Responsibilities

Act as the primary architect for our Sanity.io implementation, designing schemas that balance editor flexibility with strict data integrity.
Lead the transition from "page-based" content to a structured content model, allowing for seamless content flow between backend services and frontend consumers.
Collaborate with Enterprise Architects to ensure the CMS ecosystem integrates perfectly with GCP-based microservices (Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions).
Architect complex Sanity schemas and leverage GROQ for high-performance content fetching.
Extend the Sanity Studio with custom input components and plugins to optimize the developer and editor experience.
Build and maintain robust webhooks and event-driven triggers to sync content changes with downstream commerce systems and caches.
Implement and guide the team on handling rich text as structured data to ensure consistent rendering across diverse platforms.
Champion automated testing for CMS schemas and CI/CD pipelines (using Harness) for content migrations and Studio deployments.
Create "starter kits" and design patterns for integrating CMS data into backend services, ensuring consistency across domain teams.
Own the caching strategy for content delivery to ensure zero-latency impact on critical commerce paths.