WP Cloud powers WordPress at scale, and security is a critical part of that foundation. We’re expanding our security team to support WP Cloud, while also contributing to the protection and intelligence provided by WPScan and Jetpack Protect. As a Security Researcher, you will analyze vulnerable and malicious code, track emerging threats, and help build the tools and processes that detect, prevent, and remediate malware and other security issues across the WordPress ecosystem. If you have a knack for solving puzzles and a passion for documenting and operationalizing solutions, this is a great opportunity to make a broad impact.

The Senior Security Engineer position might be a good fit if you:

• Enjoy securing and protecting websites and applications.
• Have at least 3 years of experience as a security researcher, or equivalent experience investigating vulnerabilities, malware, or other threats.
• Understand threat models, security threats, vulnerabilities, and common attack vectors such as XSS, injection, hijacking, social engineering, and so on, along with how to mitigate them.
• Have experience with PHP and some exposure to software engineering.
• Are highly collaborative, and love participating in code reviews and discussions about architecture or design.
• Have a strong ability to use AI tools effectively to accelerate your work, improve analysis, and enhance the quality of your solutions.
• Are open, and able, to travel 2-3 weeks per year to meet up with your teammates in person.

Extra Credit:

• Experience with penetration testing and associated tools.
• Previous experience with malware detection systems.
• Reported vulnerabilities in the past.
• Know your way around WordPress and its file and database structures.
• Have experience writing and debugging WordPress plugins and themes.

Speaking of interests and skills, here are some areas in which you can grow and have further impact in the future at the company:

• Leadership – we offer a variety of leadership options to those who have an interest, including becoming a team lead and managing releases.
• Learning and development – we have a generous personal development budget and encourage you to grow your skills through courses, books, and conferences.
• Architecture – we encourage developers to build expertise in the systems they work with, guide their evolution, and mentor other developers working on them.
• Engineering effectiveness – we believe in helping other developers become more effective through tools, practices, cross-team collaborations, and process 

Compensation and Benefits

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. To see a full list of benefits by country, consult our Benefits Page. And check out these links to learn more about How We Hire and What We Expect from Ourselves. #LI-Remote

Automattic, the tech powerhouse behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, Tumblr, and WooCommerce, is looking for the world’s best systems engineers. On our Systems team, you’ll deliver high availability, performance, and security for tens of billions of page views and over a billion web surfers each month—from 30 private data centers in 30 locations on 6 continents. Help us develop, build, and maintain a leading global infrastructure and share our learnings with the world.

As part of a small and vertically integrated team responsible for a huge setup, you’ll have a unique opportunity to participate in all aspects of the management of our infrastructure, including:

• Maximizing the availability and uptime of all services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, automation and rapid response to failures;
• Making Automattic services as fast as possible for our users through optimization of server-side and client-side interactions, and work with 3rd party services where necessary;
• Ensuring our services are safe and secure for both our users and employees through a combination of proactive monitoring and enforcement, real-time response, and maintaining data integrity/backups to allow recovery from disasters;
• Removing as much friction as possible between Automattic developers and their goal of shipping software. When there are questions, we provide answers—usually in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds;

Here's a real-time traffic map. Each color represents an Automattic data center: http://automattic.com/automattic-data-centers

The Systems Engineer position might be a good fit if you:

• Have maintained large Nginx setups with advanced routing configuration, load balancing, reliable performance and high availability;
• Have run very large MySQL/MariaDB deployments while maintaining an unparalleled level of performance, uptime and data integrity;
• Have experience running and debugging PHP applications at scale;
• Understand the relationship of these services with the lower level systems stacks - filesystems, network, memory management, kernel internals, etc;
• Have deep operational and maintenance experience with very large and complex public facing web hosting systems;
• Can autonomously architect, prototype, and maintain solutions to different problems and hosting requirements;
• Possess extreme attention to detail and strive for unparalleled operational excellence;
• Are open and available for a 2-3 week post-COVID travel per year to meet up with your teammates in person.

Want to know more about how we do things? Watch:

 

We are looking to expand our team and aim to reflect and expand on the diversity of Automatticians currently working with us. At Automattic, we value diversity and know that different perspectives will ensure our team is innovative and creative thinking.

Salary range: $120,000-$180,000+ 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 for the right candidate.

We’re pleased to offer a straightforward, competitive base salary, providing financial clarity without complex variable components. This isn’t your typical work-from-home job: we are a fully-remote company with an open vacation policy. To see a full list of benefits by country, consult our Benefits Page. And check out these links to learn more about How We Hire and What We Expect from Ourselves. #LI-DNI

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.
• 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. To see a full list of benefits by country, consult our Benefits Page. And check out these links to learn more about How We Hire and What We Expect from Ourselves. #LI-Remote