We are passionate about making the web a better place. Fully distributed since 2005.
Performance Engineer, Backend
Location
United States
Posted
100 days ago
Salary
$70K - $170K / year
Seniority
Senior
Job Description
Performance Engineer, Backend
Automattic
• 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.
Job Requirements
- 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 for hands-on experience with WordPress and WooCommerce in high-traffic production environments
Benefits
- open vacation policy
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