Performance Engineer, Backend

• Identifying and eliminating backend performance bottlenecks by profiling PHP applications, analyzing MySQL/MariaDB query performance, and optimizing Memcached usage across Automattic’s products. - Building and improving performance observability—developing dashboards, instrumentation, and automated detection that surface regressions before they reach production, and give engineering teams clear, actionable data. - Partnering with product and platform engineers to review code and architecture through a performance lens, advocating for efficient database access patterns, caching strategies, and backend design decisions. - Raising the performance bar across engineering by documenting best practices, contributing to internal guidelines for PHP and database performance, and mentoring teams on how to write backend code that scales. - Proactively searching out performance issues and working to resolve them. - Deep dives on individual sites, working alongside support staff and engineers to address customer performance issues. Requirements:

• Deep hands-on experience with PHP performance: you can profile a PHP application, identify hot paths, and reason about memory usage and execution time at the code level. - Strong understanding of caching layers and strategies: you know how to design and debug Memcached (or similar) caching patterns, understand cache invalidation trade-offs, and can reason about when and where caching helps versus hides problems. - Experience doing performance work at scale: you’ve worked on systems serving millions of requests where small inefficiencies compound into real problems, and you understand the difference between optimizing on a benchmark and optimizing under production load. - Ability to instrument, measure, and prove: you don’t guess, you measure. You have experience building or using profiling tools, APM systems, and performance dashboards to turn hunches into data and verify that a fix actually worked. - Excellent written communication skills: Automattic is a distributed, async-first company. You’ll need to clearly explain complex performance findings, write up proposals, and influence engineering decisions through writing, not meetings. - Self-direction and ownership: you can identify the highest-impact performance work, prioritize it, drive it to completion, and hold yourself accountable without waiting for someone to assign it to you. - Bonus points for hands-on experience with WordPress and WooCommerce in high-traffic production environments

Salary range: $70,000-$170,000 USD.  Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency. We are searching for high-caliber candidates with the skills and qualities to have a net positive for Automattic. Pay will reflect the potential contribution and the impact you can bring, which may, in some cases, go beyond the range stated. This isn’t your typical work-from-home job—we are a fully-remote company with an open vacation policy. Read more about our compensation philosophy. To see a full list of benefits by country, consult our Benefits Page. And check out these links to learn more about How We Hire and What We Expect from Ourselves. #LI-Remote

About Automattic

Now in our 20th year, we’re the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Beeper, Tumblr, Simplenote, Jetpack, Longreads, Day One, PocketCasts, and more. We believe in making the web a better place. We’re a distributed company with more than 1500 Automatticians in nearly every corner of the globe, speaking over a hundred different languages. Enriched by this diversity, we’re united by a singular mission: to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging so anyone with a story can tell it, anyone with a product can sell it, and everyone can manage their communications from a single source. In short, we help maintain a balance in society, creating and continually refining powerful tools people can use to compete fairly—regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. We believe in Open Source, and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL. (Here’s what that might mean for you.) If you need disability-related accommodations during the application or interview process, please fill out this form. We are committed to ensuring an accessible hiring process for all candidates. Learn more about our Employee Resource Groups. You can track your application status and more at MyGreenhouse. To learn about how we handle your data, please review our Privacy Policy. View the “Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal” poster* here*. Automattic participates in the* E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.