Support Engineer, WordPress VIP
WordPress VIP is the digital platform of choice for the world’s top brands and publishers. Our expertise running performant, secure, and stable applications at scale enables our clients to power high-touch digital experiences with ease. Our platform combines the unparalleled WordPress user experience with enterprise-grade infrastructure and best-in-class support, serving billions of web requests per day.
Our customer-facing WordPress VIP support role requires a mix of debugging and development experience as well as outstanding communication skills. You’ll be working directly with both customer and agency developers, side-by-side with our Senior WordPress Engineers, on some of the highest-profile and highest-traffic WordPress sites in the world. We are looking for people with compassion, writing skills, accountability, WordPress knowledge, and code savviness.
We offer flexible, remote work arrangements allowing our team members to work when and where they feel best. However, the current opening will primarily be business-hours support for customers located on the U.S. West Coast. We’re prioritizing applicants whose work hours will primarily overlap with the Pacific time zone (UTC-8).
A day would involve:
- Maintaining the quality, accuracy, and thoroughness that is part of our high-touch, concierge, technical support.
- Helping customers and teammates via tickets and real-time discussions using a variety of research, debugging, tools, processes, detailed error reporting, and documentation.
- Solving tough problems with customer sites, themes, and platform tools that often deal with edge cases and WordPress internals at scale.
- Handling fast-moving situations and one-off projects involving complex dependencies, multiple partners, and tight timeframes.
- Observing and relaying chances to make our platform, services, and overall offering more appealing.
- Building and updating internal and customer-facing documentation.
Required skills:
- Excellent communication skills. We’re a distributed team, so frequent and clear written communication is crucial.
- Self-motivated work ethic. Self-starters who love taking initiative and seeing things through to completion do well on our teams.
- Curiosity and the desire to learn. Keeping up to date with changing WordPress and technology trends on behalf of our teams and customers, often training others once proficient. Flexibility is key.
- Proficiency and eloquence in written English. Additional spoken or written languages can be beneficial.
- Deep knowledge of WordPress and the underlying code. Whether you are currently supporting individuals with their sites or maintaining your own, we’re looking for theme, plugin, block editor, or e-commerce experience. It’s important to be able to read the code when diagnosing and potentially resolving problems and to have experience with WP-CLI, WordPress hooks and filters, imports, etc.
Useful skills to have:
- A strong understanding of the Web; including familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, REST APIs, HTTP, DNS, and SVN or Git.
- Experience working primarily in a customer-facing role, including support and training.
- Superb troubleshooting skills that help you take big problems and break them down into manageable pieces with elegant solutions.
- Understanding of issues around scalability and performance.
- Exposure to monitoring tools such as Kibana and New Relic.
Support is provided 24/7 so an ability to regularly assist with weekend coverage, as well as some holiday and evening availability, will be a requirement. Our customers are global and rely on us to provide expedient support, at any time of day.
How to Apply
Attach a resume and cover letter to this application page (below) as PDFs. We'd love to know your thoughts on the following:
- What makes for an excellent enterprise-level customer experience?
- If a customer raises an urgent issue with very few details, tell us what steps you might take with the customer and with the team to promptly help the customer.
- Tell us some details about an exciting problem you’ve worked on. Did you create something and make it better, or were you able to resolve an issue through changing an aspect of it?
About Automattic
We are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Simplenote, Jetpack, Longreads, Day One, PocketCasts, and more. We believe in making the web a better place.
We’re a distributed company with more than 1800 Automatticians in 96 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.
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