Senior Systems Engineer at Automattic

Overview

Automattic is hiring a Senior Systems Engineer to join our Infrastructure team and help deliver high availability, performance, and security for a global fleet of services, including WordPress.com, Jetpack, Tumblr, and WooCommerce. You will work on a vertically integrated team responsible for a very large, distributed infrastructure spanning private data centers and cloud regions worldwide.

What you will do

As a Senior Systems Engineer you will participate in all aspects of managing large scale infrastructure. Typical responsibilities include:

• Maximize availability and uptime of services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, automation, and rapid response to incidents.
• Optimize server side and client side performance to make Automattic services fast for users, and work with third party services where necessary.
• Ensure service security through proactive monitoring, enforcement, real time response, and maintaining data integrity and backups to enable disaster recovery.
• Reduce friction for developers by providing answers, tooling, and reliable infrastructure, often within minutes.
• Architect, prototype, and maintain solutions to varied hosting requirements and scale challenges.

Who you are

This role is a good fit for engineers who have deep operational experience with large public facing web systems and the desire to maintain high operational excellence. Preferred background includes:

• Experience maintaining large Nginx deployments, advanced routing, load balancing, and high availability setups.
• Experience running very large MySQL or MariaDB deployments with a strong focus on performance, uptime, and data integrity.
• Experience running and debugging PHP applications at scale.
• Understanding of lower level systems stacks, including filesystems, networking, memory management, and kernel internals.
• Ability to autonomously design and maintain solutions for complex hosting problems, with extreme attention to detail.
• Willingness to travel 2-3 weeks per year for in person meetups with teammates when required.

Why join Automattic

Automattic is a fully remote company with more than 1400 Automatticians across the globe. We value diversity and open source, and we aim to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. You will have the opportunity to contribute to widely used open source projects and work with an experienced distributed team.

Compensation

Salary range: $120,000 - $180,000+ USD. Salary ranges are global, and we pay in local currency. Final compensation reflects candidate experience and expected impact. For exceptional candidates, pay may exceed the posted range.

Benefits and perks

• Unlimited PTO through our open vacation policy.
• Comprehensive benefits that vary by country, see Automattic benefits page for details.
• Learning and development opportunities and budgets.
• Company gatherings and opportunities to meet colleagues in person.
• Remote first workplace, with support for home office needs.

Location and work style

This is a fully remote position. Automattic operates globally and hires across many timezones. The role expects occasional travel for team meetups, typically 2-3 weeks per year.

Equal opportunity and privacy

All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to protected characteristics. If you need disability related accommodations during the application or interview process, Automattic provides an accommodation form. Review Automattic's Privacy Policy for how candidate data is handled.

How to apply

Apply through the job page and complete the application form. You may be asked to describe the largest public facing infrastructure you have managed and provide links to public profiles or code repositories.