Senior Systems Engineer

Automattic, the tech powerhouse behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, Tumblr, and WooCommerce, is looking for the world’s best systems engineers. On our Systems team, you’ll deliver high availability, performance, and security for tens of billions of page views and over a billion web surfers each month—from 30 private data centers in 30 locations on 6 continents. Help us develop, build, and maintain a leading global infrastructure and share our learnings with the world.

As part of a small and vertically integrated team responsible for a huge setup, you’ll have a unique opportunity to participate in all aspects of the management of our infrastructure, including:

• Maximizing the availability and uptime of all services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, automation and rapid response to failures;
• Making Automattic services as fast as possible for our users through optimization of server-side and client-side interactions, and work with 3rd party services where necessary;
• Ensuring our services are safe and secure for both our users and employees through a combination of proactive monitoring and enforcement, real-time response, and maintaining data integrity/backups to allow recovery from disasters;
• Removing as much friction as possible between Automattic developers and their goal of shipping software. When there are questions, we provide answers—usually in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds;

Here's a real-time traffic map. Each color represents an Automattic data center: https://automattic.com/automattic-data-centers

The Systems Engineer position might be a good fit if you:

• Have maintained large Nginx setups with advanced routing configuration, load balancing, reliable performance and high availability;
• Have run very large MySQL/MariaDB deployments while maintaining an unparalleled level of performance, uptime and data integrity;
• Have experience running and debugging PHP applications at scale;
• Understand the relationship of these services with the lower level systems stacks - filesystems, network, memory management, kernel internals, etc;
• Have deep operational and maintenance experience with very large and complex public facing web hosting systems;
• Can autonomously architect, prototype, and maintain solutions to different problems and hosting requirements;
• Possess extreme attention to detail and strive for unparalleled operational excellence;
• Are open and available for a 2-3 week post-COVID travel per year to meet up with your teammates in person.

We are looking to expand our team and aim to reflect and expand on the diversity of Automatticians currently working with us. At Automattic, we value diversity and know that different perspectives will ensure our team is innovative and creative thinking.

Salary range: $120,000-$180,000+ USD  - Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency.

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.

About Automattic 

We are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, 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 1900 Automatticians in 96 countries speaking 120+ different languages. And, even more than growth and profitability (although we’re plenty profitable), above all, we’re driven by a mission:  We democratize publishing and commerce so anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone with a product can sell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or country.

We believe in Open Source, and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Automattic 

We’re improving diversity in the tech industry. At Automattic, we want people to love their work and show respect and empathy to all. We welcome differences and strive to increase participation from traditionally underrepresented groups. Our DEI committee involves Automatticians across the company and drives grassroots change. For example, this group has helped facilitate private online spaces for affiliated Automatticians to gather and helps run a monthly DEI People Lab series for further learning. DEI is a priority at Automattic, though our dedication influences far more than just Automatticians: We make our products freely available and translate our products into and offer customer support in numerous languages. We require unconscious bias training for our hiring teams and ensure our products are accessible across different bandwidths and devices. 

Automattic is a Most Loved Company and Disability Confident Committed. (Here’s what that might mean for you.) Learn more about our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion and our Employee Resource Groups.