Join the VIP Team

Are you interested in working on the VIP team at Automattic? This page is for you!

About Us

DSC_0144The VIP team provides consulting, support, hosting, training, and other services to some of the biggest and best WordPress sites for clients like Time Inc., Facebook, Microsoft, News Corp, FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times, and hundreds more.

As some of the biggest brands on the web, our clients are often defining and evolving models for using WordPress at scale. We work hand-in-hand with them, and treat their applications as if they were our own. The VIP team helps our clients get the most out of WordPress, doing everything from providing guidance, to reviewing their code to ensure security and performance, to developing new tools to help improve our platform.

“Working with intelligent, kind people is very motivating and makes addressing challenges so much easier.” – Shannon Smith

We’re a diverse group of people from a wide variety of backgrounds who bring excellence in software engineering, communication and problem-solving skills to help our clients and partners do amazing things with WordPress. Our company is completely distributed, so we work from anywhere we can find a good broadband connection.

Company meetup in Park City, UT
Our annual developer workshop in Napa, CA
Watching a game at Wrigley Field
Team meetup in San Francisco, CA
Training sessions in Napa, CA
Team meetup in New Orleans, LA
Hosting a meetup in Toronto, ON
Team meetup in Lisbon, Portugal
Team training session in Chicago, IL
Hosting a meetup at The New York Times

About You

If you want to join the VIP team, that means you’re passionate about building partnerships, collaborating to solve complex problems, and helping innovative organizations launch some of the most high-profile, high-traffic WordPress sites out there. You’re an amazing communicator. You’re proactive, you get things done with minimal or no direction, and you rarely pass up a chance to learn something new.

“Every day I get to work with significant and diverse clients in a team of outstanding individuals to meet bold and exciting challenges at a global scale. I also get to work with great technology in a supportive environment which fosters excellence in all areas, continual development, where I have great autonomy and where we all have a lot of fun especially at our meetups.” – Klaus Harris

In a typical day you can expect to:

  • Work closely with a client to advise them on the best way to structure their CMS, theme, feature or plugin;
  • Troubleshoot tough problems that often deal with edge cases and WordPress internals at scale;
  • Build tools to help us support our clients;
  • Write and contribute to community plugins;
  • Do performance audits of sites and the platform as a whole;
  • Review code and provide feedback and guidance to client developers;
  • Fix security issues impacting the platform or popular plugins;
  • Learn, laugh, and help out fellow co-workers in Slack.

“I learn new things every day working on VIP — from my teammates, from clients and from the code.  I’ve found VIP to be a place where I can bring my whole self to the job — the team’s diversity is a big part of our strength.” – Matt Perry

Skills that come in handy:

  • Advanced proficiency coding with WordPress.
  • A strong understanding of the Web including HTTP, PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • Experience with code security. You’re familiar with the items on the OWASP top 10 and know how to prevent them.
  • Experience with code performance. You’re familiar with caching, algorithm performance, MySQL indexes and how to leverage them.
  • Comfortable working primarily in a customer-facing role, including providing support and training to other developers.
  • You enjoy collaborating with other developers, reviewing code, and making recommendations on technique or approach.
  • Great troubleshooting skills. Must be able to take big problems and break them down into manageable pieces with elegant solutions—and importantly, keep our customers apprised of progress throughout.
  • 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. You’re comfortable prioritizing tasks and deciding what you should work on next.
  • 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.
  • Availability outside of traditional business hours. Our customers are global, and rely on us to provide expedient support, at any time of day.

We’re serious about increasing diversity in the tech industry. We encourage applications from women, people of color, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, and other communities traditionally underrepresented in this field.

“I really appreciate the focus on mental health and how the team really focuses on long term sustainable work practices” – Stéphane Boisvert

Open Positions

We are currently looking to fill these positions on the VIP team:

How To Apply

First, make sure you’ve read everything on the main Automattic website about us and about working with us.

Then, follow the instructions on the individual position listing. Please don’t contact the VIP team directly with your application.

Internships

We regularly invite applications for internships on the VIP team. You can find our current application post here. If you’re not ready to apply yet, follow the VIP blog for announcements about future internship opportunities.