Staff DevOps Engineer

About the Role

Come help us build and maintain world-class CI/CD infrastructure across Automattic. We’re looking for a Staff DevOps Engineer to join the QualityOps team. You’ll own the systems that keep engineers shipping fast and confidently: CI pipelines, test reliability, build tooling, and developer experience. Your work will directly impact how 1,500+ people ship software that powers 40%+ of the web.

What you’ll do:

• Own CI/CD infrastructure. Manage builds and pipelines, guide teams to the right CI tool for the job, and keep everything fast and reliable. You aren’t afraid of legacy configurations; you enjoy the archeology required to modernize massive, long-running build systems.
• Eliminate flakiness. Dig into flaky tests, parallelism side effects, and infrastructure edge cases until green means green.
• Curate the test suite for speed. Aggressively prune tests that don’t test anything, speed up tests that are unnecessarily slow, and enforce quality gates on what gets added.
• Improve developer experience by “walking the floor” to look for friction. Find what slows engineers down and fix it before they have to ask. Balance centralized reliability with developer autonomy.
• Enable engineers to own their tests. Track build times, work with teams to write better and faster tests, and provide frameworks that help engineers improve CI on their own. You’re a force multiplier, not a bottleneck.
• Build release tooling: deploy pipelines, pre-release test gating, and build automated steps that replace manual coordination.

What we’re looking for:

• You lead by shipping, not by planning. You thrive on solving technical bottlenecks.
• Deep experience with CI/CD systems: TeamCity, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Buildkite, or similar. Familiarity with containerized test environments.
• Strong in at least two of: PHP, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Bash.
• Track record of improving build or test reliability at scale. You’ve made a CI pipeline meaningfully faster and can show the before/after—with the metrics to prove it.
• Comfortable debugging flaky tests, parallelism issues, and infrastructure edge cases.
• Clear async communicator who documents decisions and gets work done across time zones.
• Fluent with AI-assisted development workflows. You use tools like Claude Code or Copilot daily, and can lead others in adopting AI for testing, triage, and infrastructure work.
• Self-motivated and able to work with minimal supervision.

Bonus points for:

• Experience eliminating flakiness in a large test suite—and you can talk about what you learned.
• Experience with WordPress, PHP, and MySQL.
• Open-source contributions.
• A history of breaking a stagnant CI culture and restoring engineering trust in the build.

Key skills/competency

• DevOps
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure
• Build Tools
• Test Reliability
• Developer Experience
• Python
• Go
• PHP
• JavaScript