Performance Engineer, Backend

Automattic's products — WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Beeper, Tumblr, Jetpack, and more — serve tens of billions of page views every month. The PerfOps team makes those page views as fast 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 scale. Work across the full Automattic product portfolio.

Responsibilities:
• Identify and eliminate backend performance bottlenecks by profiling PHP applications, analyzing MySQL/MariaDB query performance, and optimizing Memcached usage
• Build and improve performance observability — dashboards, instrumentation, automated detection that surfaces regressions before production
• Partner with product and platform engineers to review code and architecture through a performance lens
• Raise the performance bar across engineering by documenting best practices
• Proactively search out performance issues and work to resolve them

Requirements:
• Deep hands-on experience with PHP performance: profiling, hot paths, memory usage
• Strong understanding of caching layers: Memcached patterns, cache invalidation trade-offs
• Experience doing performance work at scale (millions of requests)
• Ability to instrument, measure, and prove: profiling tools, APM systems, performance dashboards
• Excellent written communication skills for async-first distributed company

Salary: $70,000–$170,000 USD. Fully remote.