Performance Engineer, Backend

Automattic Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Remote

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Join Automattic, the company behind industry-defining platforms like WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, and Beeper, as a Backend Performance Engineer. Our products power billions of page views monthly, and the PerfOps team is dedicated to ensuring every single one is delivered with lightning speed. This is a unique opportunity to make an immediate and enormous impact on the performance of systems used by millions worldwide.
• As a Backend Performance Engineer, you will be at the forefront of optimizing the speed and efficiency of our backend infrastructure. Your primary focus will be on identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks across our diverse product portfolio. This involves deep dives into critical areas such as PHP application profiling, analyzing and optimizing MySQL/MariaDB query performance, and fine-tuning Memcached usage.
• You will play a pivotal role in building and enhancing our performance observability capabilities. This includes developing sophisticated dashboards, implementing robust instrumentation, and creating automated detection systems. The goal is to proactively surface performance regressions before they impact users and to provide engineering teams with clear, actionable data to drive improvements.
• Collaboration is key in this role. You will partner closely with product engineers, systems engineers, and network operations teams. Your expertise will be sought after in reviewing code and architectural designs through a performance-first lens. You will advocate for efficient database access patterns, implement effective caching strategies, and influence backend design decisions to ensure scalability and speed.
• Beyond reactive problem-solving, you will be instrumental in raising the overall performance bar across our engineering organization. This involves documenting best practices, contributing to internal guidelines for PHP and database performance, and actively mentoring teams on how to write backend code that scales efficiently.
• A significant part of your role will be proactive performance hunting. You will continuously search for potential performance issues, investigate their root causes, and implement solutions to resolve them before they become critical problems.
• You will also engage in deep-dive analyses of individual sites, working directly with support staff and engineers to address specific customer performance concerns. This hands-on approach ensures that we not only optimize our systems at scale but also provide tailored solutions for unique user challenges.
• Your work will directly contribute to the user experience of millions, ensuring that websites and applications built on Automattic's platforms are fast, responsive, and reliable. You will be the guardian of milliseconds, turning complex performance data into tangible improvements.
• This role requires a blend of deep technical expertise, a passion for optimization, and strong communication skills to effectively share findings and influence technical direction in a remote-first environment.
• You will be empowered to take ownership of performance initiatives, from identification and analysis to implementation and validation, driving measurable improvements across the entire Automattic ecosystem.
• If you thrive on the challenge of understanding why something is slow and derive immense satisfaction from making it measurably faster, this role is an exceptional opportunity to apply your skills where they matter most.

🎯 Requirements

• Deep hands-on experience with PHP performance tuning, including profiling applications, identifying hot code paths, and analyzing memory usage and execution time at the code level.
• Strong understanding of caching layers and strategies, with experience designing and debugging Memcached (or similar) patterns, understanding cache invalidation trade-offs, and reasoning about caching effectiveness.
• Proven experience in performance engineering for large-scale systems (millions of requests), understanding the compounding impact of inefficiencies and optimizing under production load.
• Ability to instrument, measure, and validate performance improvements using profiling tools, APM systems, and performance dashboards.
• Excellent written communication skills for clearly explaining complex performance findings and influencing engineering decisions remotely.
• Demonstrated self-direction, ownership, and the ability to prioritize and drive performance initiatives to completion.

🏖️ Benefits

• Fully remote work environment with a global team.
• Open vacation policy, encouraging work-life balance.
• Competitive salary ($70,000-$170,000 USD, adjusted for local currency and potential contribution).
• Comprehensive benefits package (details vary by country, consult Benefits Page).
• Opportunity to work on highly visible, impactful products used by millions worldwide.
• Continuous learning and professional development opportunities.

Skills & Technologies

PHP

MySQL

GitHub

Backend

Remote

$70k-170k

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Automattic Inc.

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About Automattic Inc.

Automattic Inc. is a distributed technology company best known for WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, and other web-publishing and commerce tools. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in San Francisco with employees in over 90 countries, it contributes heavily to the open-source WordPress project while operating commercial services that host, secure, and extend websites for individuals, small businesses, and enterprises worldwide.

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