Performance Engineer, Backend

About Automattic

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. We are a fully-remote company with an open vacation policy, celebrating our 20th year in business and committed to democratizing publishing, commerce, and messaging globally.

The Role: Performance Engineer, Backend

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.

Key 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.

Required Qualifications

• 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

• Hands-on experience with WordPress and WooCommerce in high-traffic production environments.

Key skills/competency

• PHP Performance Optimization
• MySQL/MariaDB Tuning
• Memcached Caching Strategies
• Performance Profiling
• System Scalability
• Observability & Instrumentation
• Backend Architecture Review
• Database Access Patterns
• Code Optimization
• Distributed Systems