Support Engineer

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA URL:

WordPress VIP is the digital platform of choice for the world’s top brands and publishers. Our expertise running performant, secure, and stable applications at scale enables our clients to power high-touch digital experiences with ease. Our platform combines the unparalleled WordPress user experience with enterprise-grade infrastructure and best-in-class support, serving billions of web requests per day.

Our customer-facing WordPress VIP support role requires a mix of debugging and development experience as well as outstanding communication skills. You’ll be working directly with both customer and agency developers, side-by-side with our Senior WordPress Engineers, on some of the highest-profile and highest-traffic WordPress sites in the world. We are looking for people with compassion, writing skills, accountability, WordPress knowledge, and code savviness.

Automattic is a distributed company where staff choose their own schedules and work from wherever they are. For this role, however, we’re expanding our team in specific regions. We’re prioritizing applicants interested in a daytime work schedule and residing within these time zones:

• Americas: UTC-5 and UTC-8
• Europe and Africa: UTC+0 through UTC+2

If you live in another region, we'd still love to hear from you! VIP is in high growth mode and we fill this position on a rolling basis as we expand teams around the world.

A day would involve:

• Maintaining the quality, accuracy, and thoroughness that is part of our high-touch, concierge, technical support.
• Helping customers and teammates via tickets and real-time discussions using a variety of research, debugging, tools, processes, detailed error reporting, and documentation.
• Solving tough problems with customer sites, themes, and platform tools that often deal with edge cases and WordPress internals at scale.
• Handling fast-moving situations and one-off projects involving complex dependencies, multiple partners, and tight timeframes.
• Observing and relaying chances to make our platform, services, and overall offering more appealing.
• Building and updating internal and customer-facing documentation.

Required skills:

• Excellent communication skills. We’re a distributed team, so frequent and clear written communication is crucial.
• Self-motivated work ethic. Self-starters who love taking initiative and seeing things through to completion do well on our teams.
• Curiosity and the desire to learn. Keeping up to date with changing WordPress and technology trends on behalf of our teams and customers, often training others once proficient. Flexibility is key.
• Proficiency and eloquence in written English. Additional spoken or written languages can be beneficial.
• Deep knowledge of WordPress and experience with PHP. Whether you are currently supporting individuals with their sites or maintaining your own, we’re looking for theme, plugin, block editor, or e-commerce experience. It's important to be able to read the code when diagnosing and potentially resolving problems.

Useful skills to have:

• A strong understanding of the Web; including familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, REST APIs, HTTP, DNS, and SVN or Git.
• Experience working primarily in a customer-facing role, including support and training.
• Superb troubleshooting skills that help you take big problems and break them down into manageable pieces with elegant solutions.
• Understanding of issues around scalability and performance.
• Exposure to monitoring tools such as Kibana and New Relic.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We want to build WordPress VIP and Automattic as an environment where people love their work and show respect and compassion to those with whom we interact. Diversity typically includes, but is not limited to, differences in race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, political and religious affiliation, socioeconomic background, cultural background, geographic location, physical disabilities and abilities, relationship status, veteran status, and age. To work on diversity means that we encourage these differences, and strive to improve the visibility of traditionally underrepresented groups. Read more about our commitment to diversity and inclusion.