WordPress doesn’t try to keep its users inside walled gardens, a rare thing in a world that is dangerously moving away from the open web. Instead, WordPress gives them the freedom to build a business website, an online store, or a personal blog – the way they like it. Big sites or small, using the community-run open source project or Automattic’s WordPress.com, vanilla or customised with with hundreds of plugins, WordPress users always get to own and control their data, their expression, and their freedom.
What have we worked on recently?
- Gutenberg – a new block-level editor, clean abstractions for users, too, not just developers.
- Jetpack is a plugin that brings cloud-scale features to self-hosted sites and our latest addition is Rewind, think git for WordPress sites.
- WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform on the web
- Longer product list is on Automattic.com.
How do we work?
- We open-source! We’re cool with open-sourcing everything except passwords, or secret keys.
- We ship often, we deploy many times daily, with the help of peer code review and continuous integration.
- Our engineering organization is flat, and you can be involved in any discussion across our many communication channels.
- We’re kind to each other and our users – we strive to build a positive, supportive and inclusive culture of cohesive teams focused on delivering value to our customers.
Enough about us, let‘s talk more about you. The Software Engineer position might be a good fit if you:
- Have experience working with several programming languages.
- Have experience working on a large-scale system. Making it faster, more scalable, and fault-tolerant.
- Know about systems architecture, design patterns, and testing.
- Are highly collaborative and you love participating in code reviews and discussions about architecture, or design.
- Are passionate about and accomplished in software development; in particular, advanced PHP knowledge is a plus.
- Are knowledgeable about design patterns and testability; having experience with testing frameworks, performance testing and unit testing is very welcome.
- Are thoughtful about product design, with good user experience instincts.
Extra credit:
- WordPress programming experience.
- Familiarity with JavaScript.
- Data analysis experience, and understanding of how analytics can help with product decisions.
- Knowledge of tooling and build systems.
- Open source contributions, particularly involvement in open source (or other) communities.
- Experience working on accessibility.
Speaking of interests and skills, here some areas in which you can grow and have further impact in the future:
- 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 develop expertise in the systems they work with, guide their evolution and mentor other developers working on them.
- Engineering effectiveness – helping other developers become more effective through tools, practices, cross-team collaborations, and process improvements.
- Leadership – we offer a variety of leadership options to those who have interest, including becoming a team lead.
- These are exciting times at Automattic and you’ll have a unique opportunity to shape the future of our products. Join us! We look forward to hearing from you.
We’re serious about growing diversity in the tech industry. We want to build Automattic as an environment where people love their work and show respect and empathy 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, disabilities and abilities, relationship status, veteran status, and age. To work on diversity means that we welcome these differences, and strive to increase the visibility of traditionally underrepresented groups. Read more about our dedication to diversity and inclusion.
How to apply
Does this sound interesting? If yes, please send a short email to jobs @ automattic dot com telling us about yourself and attach a résumé as a PDF. Let us know what you can contribute to the team. Include the title of the position you’re applying for and your name in the subject.
Proofread! Make sure you spell and capitalize WordPress and Automattic correctly. We are lucky to receive hundreds of applications for every position, so try to make your application stand out. If you apply for multiple positions or send multiple emails there will be one reply.
If you’re reading this on a site other than automattic.com please ensure you visit automattic.com/work-with-us for the latest details on applying.
Please answer the following questions in your cover letter. We will only consider candidates whose cover letters answer these questions.
- Tell us some details about an interesting programming problem you’ve worked on. What made it interesting?
- How do you use our products or their competitors’? How would you improve one of them?
- When you make a GET request to: https://public-api.wordpress.com/wpcom/v2/work-with-us with a header X-future: automattician you will receive a secret. What is it?
- What questions do you have for us?
We are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Longreads, VaultPress, Akismet, Gravatar, Crowdsignal, Cloudup, and more. We believe in making the web a better place.
We’re a distributed company with 928 Automatticians in 69 countries speaking 87 different languages. Our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world.
We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.
We strive to live by the Automattic Creed.
Come work with us.