Performance Engineer, Backend at Automattic

This role is ideal for a mid-to-senior level Backend Engineer who obsesses over performance metrics and system efficiency. You should have a deep mastery of the

Work type: remote

Location: Remote

Salary: $70,000 – $170,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

This role is ideal for a mid-to-senior level Backend Engineer who obsesses over performance metrics and system efficiency. You should have a deep mastery of the PHP ecosystem, including profiling and memory management, alongside a strong grasp of MySQL and caching layers like Memcached. Since this position sits within the "PerfOps" team, they are looking for someone who enjoys the "puzzle" of high-traffic systems—specifically those serving millions of requests where every millisecond counts. The standout feature of this position is the "async-first" remote culture, offering true flexibility and an open vacation policy. The salary range is broad ($70k–$170k) and location-agnostic, meaning your pay is based on impact rather than where you live. You’ll have the unique opportunity to work across a massive portfolio—including WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr—ensuring your optimizations have an immediate, global impact on the open web. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Can identify a bottleneck in a complex PHP application using only profiling data and query plans. * Prefer writing data-driven proposals over sitting in long meetings. * Have experience scaling systems that handle billions of monthly page views. * Get a "hit" of satisfaction from seeing a performance dashboard trend downward after a deployment.

Job Description

[Automattic](https://automattic.com/)’s products—[WordPress.com](http://wordpress.com/), [WooCommerce](https://href.li/?http://woocommerce.com/), [Beeper](https://www.beeper.com/), [Tumblr](https://href.li/?https://www.tumblr.com/), [Jetpack](https://href.li/?http://jetpack.com/), and more—serve tens of billions of page views every month from data centers around the world. The PerfOps team exists to make those page views as quickly as possible. As a Backend Performance Engineer, you’ll dive deep into query plans, cache hit ratios, and PHP profiling data to find the milliseconds that matter at our scale. You’ll work across the full Automattic product portfolio: if it runs on our backend, it’s your playground.

This is an opportunity to do performance work where the impact is immediate and enormous. You’ll collaborate with product engineers, systems engineers, and network operations, bringing a performance-first mindset to architecture decisions, code reviews, and incident response. If you love the puzzle of why something is slow and get satisfaction from making it measurably faster, this role was made for you.

Responsibilities:

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](https://automattic.com/compensation/). To see a full list of benefits by country, consult our [Benefits Page](https://automattic.com/benefits/). And check out these links to learn more about [How We Hire](https://automattic.com/how-we-hire/) and [What We Expect from Ourselves](https://automattic.com/expectations/). #LI-Remote

About Automattic

Now in [our 20th year](https://timeline.automattic.com/), we’re the people behind [WordPress.com](http://wordpress.com/), [WooCommerce](https://href.li/?http://woocommerce.com/), [Beeper](https://www.beeper.com/), [Tumblr](https://href.li/?https://www.tumblr.com/), [Simplenote](https://href.li/?http://simplenote.com/), [Jetpack](https://href.li/?http://jetpack.com/), [Longreads](https://href.li/?http://longreads.com/), [Day One](https://href.li/?https://dayoneapp.com/), [PocketCasts](https://href.li/?https://www.pocketcasts.com/), 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](https://github.com/Automattic), and the vast majority of our work is available under the [GPL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License). Automattic is a [Most Loved Company](https://mostlovedworkplace.com/companies/automattic-inc/), an Equal Opportunity employer, and [Disability Confident Committed](https://disabilityconfident.campaign.gov.uk/). ([Here’s what that might mean for you](https://happinessengineer.blog/2022/09/08/happiness-for-everyone-working-with-a-disability-at-automattic/).) If you need disability-related accommodations during the application or interview process, please [fill out this form](https://automattic.com/disability-related-accommodation-request/). We are committed to ensuring an accessible hiring process for all candidates. Learn more about our [Employee Resource Groups](https://automattic.com/automattician-resource-groups/).

You can track your application status and more at [MyGreenhouse](https://my.greenhouse.io/users/sign_in).

To learn about how we handle your data, please review our [Privacy Policy](https://automattic.com/privacy/).

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