The WordPress Special Projects Team helps interesting people, organizations and projects to have an excellent experience with their WordPress websites. We connect our partners with the best that the WordPress community has to offer, from design and development to hosting and maintenance.
On a given day, the team is consulting, troubleshooting, improving our partner sites, managing our network of contractors, and of course, building things with WordPress. We are looking for engineers who have extensive experience building sites with WordPress (maybe that’s within an agency, maybe that’s as a freelancer). Expertise in best practices around performance and security are essential to this role.
How do we work?
- We’re kind to each other and our users – we strive to build a positive, supportive, and inclusive culture of cohesive teams focused on delivering value to our customers.
- We work as a global and distributed workforce resulting in a unique way of working built around our creed.
- We offer flexible work arrangements allowing our team members to work when they feel best.
- We open-source! We’re cool with open-sourcing everything except passwords, or secret keys.
- We ship often, deploying many times daily with the help of peer code review, continuous integration, and our global workforce in over 70 countries.
- We welcome collaboration, and you can be involved in any discussion across our many communication channels.
Enough about us, let‘s talk more about you. In this role, you will:
- Advise and consult on WordPress development best practices, including coding standards, security, and performance.
- Guide the team’s contractors and Technical Account Managers on architectural planning and decisions.
- Providing code review and testing according to best practices.
- Assist with theme and plugin development for partner sites.
- Design, develop, test, and refine internal tools to facilitate complex migrations of content from non-WordPress sites into WordPress sites and that support the team’s work.
- Participate in team-wide strategy and planning conversations.
You have:
- Expert knowledge of PHP development.
- Expert knowledge of WordPress development best practices, especially security and performance.
- Experience with developing and supporting high-profile, high-traffic WordPress websites.
- Familiarity with JavaScript and CSS.
- Excellent communication skills in the service of advising and supporting influential partners/clients.
- The ability to get things done while reducing friction for your colleagues and our clients. You respond rapidly when called upon and are proactive. You view our customers as partners and pride yourself in establishing long-term relationships. You enjoy working with everyone from other engineers to project managers to designers.
Extra credit:
- Expertise in Automattic’s products e.g. Jetpack or WooCommerce.
- Experience working on accessibility.
Speaking of interests and skills, here are some areas in which you can grow and have further impact in the future at the company:
- Leadership – we offer a variety of leadership options to those who have interest, including becoming a team lead and managing releases.
- Learning and development – we have a generous personal development budget and encourage you to grow your skills through courses, books and conferences.
- Architecture – we encourage developers to develop expertise in the systems they work with, guide their evolution and mentor other developers working on them.
- Engineering effectiveness – we believe in helping other developers become more effective through tools, practices, cross-team collaborations, and process improvements.
- These are exciting times at Automattic and you’ll have a unique opportunity to shape the future of our products. Join us! We look forward to hearing from you.
What to Expect
We know applying to jobs can be stressful and we want to ease the stress by giving clear expectations upfront about our process. We’ve outlined everything you need to know here including all of the steps in the process as well as how we approach hiring.
Please note that we are paying extra attention to your answers to the questions below. They are a significant part of the hiring process, and we will review them just like we would review any other step of the hiring process. We’re always iterating so if you happen to join us in the process, please feel free to offer feedback on what else we can include there!
ABOUT AUTOMATTIC
We are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, Simplenote, Longreads, Day One, and more. We believe in making the web a better place.
We’re a distributed company with more than 1600 Automatticians in 80+ countries speaking 90+ different languages. We democratize publishing and commerce so anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone with a product can sell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or country.
We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION AT AUTOMATTIC
We’re improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech industry. At Automattic, we want people to love their work and show respect and empathy to all. We welcome differences and strive to increase participation from traditionally underrepresented groups. Our DEI committee involves Automatticians across the company and drives grassroots change. For example, this group has helped facilitate private online spaces for affiliated Automatticians to gather and helps run a monthly DEI People Lab series for further learning. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a priority at Automattic, though our dedication influences far more than just Automatticians: We make our products freely available and translate our products into and offer customer support in numerous languages. We require unconscious bias training for our hiring teams and ensure our products are accessible across different bandwidths and devices. Learn more about our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion and our Employee Resource Groups.
Deadline for applications: 11.07.2022.
