Backend Performance Engineer at Automattic

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Beeper, Tumblr, Jetpack, and other popular products, serves tens of billions of page views monthly from data centers globally. The PerfOps team is dedicated to making these page views load as quickly as possible. As a Backend Performance Engineer, you will deeply analyze query plans, cache hit ratios, and PHP profiling data to identify and optimize critical milliseconds at our immense scale. Your work will span Automattic's entire product portfolio, making any backend system your domain.

This role offers an immediate and significant impact on performance. You will collaborate with product engineers, systems engineers, and network operations, embedding a performance-first mindset into architecture decisions, code reviews, and incident response. If you are passionate about deciphering the root causes of slowness and derive satisfaction from making systems measurably faster, this position is ideal for you.

Responsibilities

• Identify and eliminate backend performance bottlenecks by profiling PHP applications, analyzing MySQL/MariaDB query performance, and optimizing Memcached usage across all Automattic products.
• Develop and enhance performance observability by building dashboards, instrumentation, and automated detection systems that surface regressions before they reach production, providing engineering teams with clear, actionable data.
• Partner with product and platform engineers to review code and architecture through a performance lens, advocating for efficient database access patterns, robust caching strategies, and optimized backend design decisions.
• Elevate the performance standards across engineering by documenting best practices, contributing to internal guidelines for PHP and database performance, and mentoring teams on how to write scalable backend code.
• Proactively seek out performance issues and actively work towards their resolution.
• Conduct deep dives on individual sites, collaborating with support staff and engineers to address customer-reported performance issues.

Requirements

• Demonstrated deep hands-on experience with PHP performance: You can effectively profile a PHP application, identify hot paths, and analyze memory usage and execution time at the code level.
• Strong understanding of caching layers and strategies: You are proficient in designing and debugging Memcached (or similar) caching patterns, understand the trade-offs of cache invalidation, and can determine when caching truly helps versus when it merely masks underlying problems.
• Proven experience in performance work at scale: You have worked on systems serving millions of requests where minor inefficiencies accumulate into significant issues, and you understand the difference between optimizing on a benchmark versus optimizing under production load.
• Ability to instrument, measure, and prove results: You prioritize measurement over guesswork. You have experience building or utilizing profiling tools, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) systems, and performance dashboards to transform hypotheses into data and verify the effectiveness of a solution.
• Excellent written communication skills: As a distributed, async-first company, you must clearly explain complex performance findings, write comprehensive proposals, and influence engineering decisions through written communication rather than solely through meetings.
• Strong self-direction and ownership: You can identify the highest-impact performance work, prioritize it independently, drive it to completion, and hold yourself accountable without requiring constant assignments.
• Bonus points: Hands-on experience with WordPress and WooCommerce in high-traffic production environments.

Salary and Benefits

The salary range for this position is $70,000-$170,000 USD. Please note that our salary ranges are global and apply regardless of your location; we pay in local currency. We are seeking high-caliber candidates who will provide a net positive contribution to Automattic. Pay will reflect your potential contribution and impact, which may, in some cases, exceed the stated range. This is not a typical work-from-home job, as 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.

About Automattic

Now in our 20th year, we are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Beeper, Tumblr, Simplenote, Jetpack, Longreads, Day One, PocketCasts, and more. We are committed to making the web a better place. As a distributed company, we have over 1500 Automatticians in nearly every corner of the globe, speaking over a hundred different languages. Enriched by this diversity, we are united by a singular mission: to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging so that 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 essence, we help maintain societal balance by creating and continuously refining powerful tools that people can use to compete fairly, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or geographical location. We believe in Open Source, and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.

Automattic is recognized as a Most Loved Company, an Equal Opportunity employer, and Disability Confident Committed. If you require disability-related accommodations during the application or interview process, please fill out this form. We are dedicated 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 understand how we handle your data, please review our Privacy Policy. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. 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.