Description

Automattic, the driving force behind iconic platforms like WordPress.com, Jetpack, Tumblr, and WooCommerce, is seeking exceptional Systems Engineers to join our world-class team. In this role, you will be instrumental in ensuring the high availability, peak performance, and robust security of our infrastructure, which serves tens of billions of page views and over a billion web surfers monthly across a global network of 30 private data centers spanning 30 locations on 6 continents. This is a unique opportunity to help us develop, build, and maintain a leading global infrastructure and share our deep technical insights with the wider world.

As part of a small, tightly knit, and vertically integrated team managing a massive and complex setup, you will have unparalleled exposure to all facets of our infrastructure management, including:

• Maximizing Availability and Uptime: Proactively planning, making sound architectural decisions, implementing robust automation, and providing rapid and effective responses to failures to ensure the continuous availability and maximum uptime of all our critical services.
• Optimizing for Speed and Performance: Relentlessly pursuing optimal performance for our users by meticulously analyzing and optimizing both server-side and client-side interactions, and strategically collaborating with third-party service providers where necessary to enhance speed and responsiveness.
• Ensuring Security and Data Integrity: Implementing and maintaining a comprehensive security posture to safeguard our services for both our users and employees. This involves proactive monitoring and enforcement of security policies, providing real-time incident response, and maintaining robust data integrity and backup systems to ensure swift recovery from any potential disasters.
• Enabling Developer Velocity: Minimizing friction for Automattic developers in their software shipping process. We pride ourselves on providing rapid and accurate answers to their technical questions – often within minutes, sometimes even seconds – to keep their workflows seamless.

The Systems Engineer position might be a good fit if you

• Are an Nginx Expert at Scale: Possess extensive experience maintaining large and complex Nginx setups, including advanced routing configurations, sophisticated load balancing strategies, ensuring consistently reliable performance, and maintaining high availability.
• Are a MySQL/MariaDB Power User: Have a proven track record of running very large MySQL/MariaDB deployments while consistently achieving unparalleled levels of performance, exceptional uptime, and rock-solid data integrity.
• Understand PHP Application Deployment: Have significant experience running and effectively debugging PHP applications in high-traffic, large-scale environments.
• Have Deep Systems Understanding: Comprehend the intricate relationships between high-level services (Nginx, MySQL, PHP) and the underlying lower-level system stacks, including filesystems, network configurations, memory management, and kernel internals.
• Have Extensive Operational Experience: Possess deep operational and maintenance experience with very large and complex, public-facing web hosting systems that handle significant traffic.
• Are an Autonomous Architect and Problem Solver: Can independently architect, rapidly prototype, and reliably maintain solutions to diverse and challenging problems and varying hosting requirements.
• Have Unwavering Attention to Detail: Possess an extreme attention to detail and consistently strive for unparalleled operational excellence in all aspects of your work.
• Are Open to Global Team Collaboration: Are open and available for approximately 2-3 weeks of travel per yearto meet and collaborate in person with your globally distributed teammates.

Note: If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don’t check 100% of the boxes—that’s okay—we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.