Backend Performance Engineer at Automattic
JobsPerformance Engineer, Backend Performance Engineer, Backend Automattic's products-WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Beeper, Tumblr, Jetpack, 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.
Salary Range:
$70,000-$170,000 USD. Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency.
About Automattic:
Now in our 20th year, we're the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Beeper, 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 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.
Equal Employment Opportunity:
Automattic is a Most Loved Company, an Equal Opportunity employer, and Disability Confident Committed. We are committed 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 learn about 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.
Job Details:
1 Open position Apply Now
Application Instructions:
First Name Last Name Preferred First Name Email Phone Location Resume/CV * (File types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf) Cover Letter (File types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf)
Additional Questions:
Have you profiled production PHP applications to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks? *Please selectYesNo
What is your experience level with backend systems where you have done hands-on performance work? Experience level for applications with daily traffic of: *Please select<100K requests/day100K-1M requests/day1M-10M requests/day10M+ requests/day
Describe a specific backend performance problem you identified and resolved in a production environment. What was the root cause, how did you find it, and how did you verify the fix worked? *
How did you hear about this role? *Please selectAutomattic Employee (please specify below)RecruiterWordPress UserI saw this job on LinkedInWordCampTumblrHTTP Header/X-hackerPowerToFlyStackOverflowGlassdoorGoogleTikTok/YouTube videoOther
If you selected "Automattic Employee" or "Other" above, can you tell us more? Do you have a LinkedIn profile? If so, please provide a link. Have you reviewed the compensation details (salary range) provided in the job description above? *Read more about our compensation philosophy here.
Please indicate your salary expectation for this role. *
Voluntary Self-Identification:
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file. As set forth in Automattic's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.
Disability Status:
Race Please selectDecline To Self IdentifyTwo or More RacesNative Hawaiian or Other Pacific IslanderWhiteHispanic or LatinoBlack or African AmericanAsianAmerican Indian or Alaskan Native Gender Please selectDecline To Self IdentifyFemaleMale
If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows: A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability. A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veterans discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service. An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense. An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.
Veteran Status Please selectI dont wish to answerI identify as one or more of the classifications of a protected veteranI am not a protected veteran
Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005 Expires 04/30/2026
Why are you being asked to complete this form?
We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years. Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.
How do you know if you have a disability?
A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your "major life activities." If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to: Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally) Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fib