Work at Automattic

Automattic is currently looking for bright, talented people (regardless of geographic location) to help us change the world.

Here are things that are important for all positions.

  • Great communication skills. We’re a distributed team, so frequent and clear written communication is a must.
  • Self-driven work ethic. You need to be a self-starter who loves taking initiative and seeing things through to completion.
  • Curiosity and the desire to learn. Our business is changing and growing fast, who knows what will be the skills of tomorrow? Flexibility is key.

Our positions are all full-time with full benefits. If you’re interested in learning more about Automattic as a company before applying, please see our How We Work page.

Happiness Officer

While we don’t have an “office” in the traditional sense, we do have an amazing lounge/coworking space at Pier 38 in San Francisco that we often use for events. This person would need to qualify first as a Happiness Engineer (see below) but live in San Francisco and be at the lounge every day. Office management includes a lot of odds and ends, like dealing with schwag, part-time support to CEO, managing events and parties, and having great interior design sense. In between those things, you’ll help the Happiness team delight our users. The person we feel would do well in this job would also:

  • Live in San Francisco, and be able to come to the lounge in SOMA easily.
  • Have exceptional organizational and time management skills.
  • Be patient, self-motivated, and unafraid of challenges.
  • Have an enduring drive to follow up on unfinished items.
  • Qualify as a Happiness Engineer first.

Growth Engineer

Your passion is to find repeatable and scalable ways to increase customer growth and conversions for online services. You could have a sales or an engineering background (or both). Your approach is highly analytical and testing based. One of your favorite blogs is startup-marketing.com and you know who Hiten Shah is.

  • Fluent with user surveys (using Polldaddy), multi-variate testing, and conversion analytics tools.
  • Great at using data to back up your ideas.
  • Experience with Freemium and online subscription models.
  • Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and PHP.
  • Excellent writing and communication skills.

Head of Ad Sales

We are looking for someone with deep experience in selling and running online ads who is excited by the opportunity to create better ad products for one of the largest audiences on the internet. We expect to sell sponsorships and ads directly and through partners.

  • Active blogger familiar with Open Source and online publishing technologies.
  • Deep understanding of online ad networks and ad serving systems.
  • Well connected in the world of ad agencies and large brand advertisers.
  • Morally opposed to shady ad serving and user tracking schemes.

Designer

The secret to the sauce? Combining high technology with great design. As a designer at Automattic, you’re responsible for making sure the amazing things our engineers can create are beautiful to look at and easy to use. You’re designing for the web, yes, but you’re doing so with an old-school dedication to simplicity and clarity.

  • You thoroughly understand typographical terminology and concepts, and can execute them on the web.
  • You demonstrate a world-class knowledge of open web standards like HTML and CSS. If you don’t know PHP, you’re comfortable with learning it as you go.
  • You’re comfortable acting as the creative force in a small interdisciplinary team, working alongside a project manager, engineers, support staff, and freelance writers and illustrators.
  • You can give and take constructive criticism from both designers and non-designers alike, from a team distributed around the world.
  • You have a portfolio that demonstrates a great sense of style and impressive technical chops.

To apply, please fill out our application form.

Theme Wrangler

You live and breathe WordPress themes. You are equally at home in Photoshop/Gimp, PHP, CSS, or the terminal. You’ve built numerous WordPress-as-CMS sites from scratch. Everything you’ve touched is GPL. You’ve probably written a theme framework. Come help us wrangle the wild and woolly world of themes.

  • World-class HTML + CSS + WordPress skills.
  • Nuanced sense of design.
  • Understanding of Open Source and the various licenses around it.
  • Ability to take a project from idea to execution to website to blog.
  • Excellent writing and documentation skills, the ability to teach people, a big bonus.

Mobile Engineer

Take WordPress and other Automattic projects to the small screen by developing Open Source mobile products for multiple mobile platforms. Work on apps for Android, Pre, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, and other platforms using such interfaces like our XML-RPC API. The kind of person we are looking for would have:

  • Strong programming skills in multiple languages including Cocoa and Java.
  • Experience in developing and launching a popular mobile application.
  • Familiarity with the iTunes App store process.
  • Passion for blogging and a deep understanding of WordPress and the XML-RPC API.
  • Solid writing and communication skills.
  • Good product instincts and user experience chops.
  • Open Source project experience.

Code Wrangler

As a developer here you’re responsible for Making Stuff Go. The job is tough to describe because it’s so broad, but historically it has included new product development from conception to implementation, high-volume and high-concurrency programming, and a MacGyver-like dedication to squashing bugs. Here are some skills that will come in handy:

  • A strong understanding of the Web including HTTP, clean URIs, HTML, and CSS.
  • Proficiency with scripting languages, particularly PHP. Low-level language experience a plus, but not required.
  • Experience running and developing on Open Source platforms like Linux.
  • The ability to iterate and ship ideas quickly, with loose (at best) direction.
  • Knowledge of typography and design basics, the ability to create simple and usable interfaces.
  • Must be comfortable with customer-facing roles including support and documentation.
  • Knowledge of how, and when, to optimize PHP and SQL.

Systems Wrangler

We’re committed to providing the fastest and most reliable web experience out there, which means eliminating as many single points of failure as possible. We currently support 1,200+ machines in multiple datacenters. If the goal of this role had to be described in one sentence, it would be to remove all friction from developers’ minds.

Our platform currently consists of the following software: Debian, PHP, MySQL, Nginx, Varnish, Wackamole, Spread, Nagios, Munin, Monit, Postfix, MyDNS, Mogile, Lucene, ejabberd, Subversion, and Servermattic.

Happiness Engineer

Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help. We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks. The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:

  • Patience and grace.
  • Excellent writing skills.
  • Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.
  • Let us know about your natural-language fluency and your coding chops.

How to Apply

If you feel you might be the best person in the world for any of these positions, please send a short email to jobs@ this domain telling us about yourself and attach a resumé. Put the title of the position you’re applying for and your name in the subject. Proofread! Make sure you spell and capitalize WordPress and Automattic correctly. We are lucky to receive many hundreds of applications for every person we hire — try to make your application stand out.

Typically before making someone a full-time offer we work with them on a trial basis first, usually from 2-6 weeks on a contract project. We do this because nothing replicates the crucible of actually working with someone, and it’s the best way to determine mutual compatibility, communication style, and work ethic.