Performance Engineer, Backend

Automattic's products 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 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 our scale.

Responsibilities:
- Identifying and eliminating backend performance bottlenecks by profiling PHP applications, analyzing MySQL/MariaDB query performance, and optimizing Memcached usage
- Building and improving performance observability with dashboards, instrumentation, and automated detection
- Partnering with product and platform engineers to review code and architecture through a performance lens
- Raising the performance bar across engineering by documenting best practices and mentoring teams
- Proactively searching out performance issues and working to resolve them

Requirements:
- Deep hands-on experience with PHP performance profiling
- Strong understanding of caching layers and strategies (Memcached or similar)
- Experience doing performance work at scale (millions of requests)
- Ability to instrument, measure, and prove with profiling tools and APM systems
- Excellent written communication skills
- Bonus: hands-on experience with WordPress and WooCommerce

Salary: $70,000-$170,000 USD