Senior Systems Engineer - remote

Automattic
Posted 2 years ago
We Work Remotely
We are looking for someone to join a team dedicated to  providing high availability, performance and security for tens of billions page views and over a billion web surfers every month from 28 locations on 6 continents. You will be involved in helping us develop, build, and maintain a leading global infrastructure and sharing our learnings with the world.

As part of a small and vertically integrated team responsible for a very large setup, you will have the opportunity to participate in all aspects of the management of our infrastructure, including:

  • Maximizing the availability and uptime of all services through proactive planning, sound architectural decisions, automation and rapid response to failures;
  • Making Automattic services as fast as possible for our users through optimization of server-side and client-side interactions, and work with 3rd party services where necessary;
  • Ensuring our services are safe and secure for both our users and employees through a combination of proactive monitoring and enforcement, real-time response, and ensuring data integrity/backups to allow recovery from disasters;
  • Removing as much friction as possible between Automattic developers and their goal of shipping software. When there are questions, we provide answers usually in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds;
Here's a real-time traffic map. Each color represents an Automattic data center: https://automattic.com/automattic-data-centers


The Systems Wrangler position might be a good fit if you:

  • Have maintained large Nginx setups with advanced routing configuration, load balancing, reliable performance and high availability;
  • Have run very large MySQL/MariaDB deployments while maintaining an unparalleled level of performance, uptime and data integrity;
  • Have experience running and debugging PHP applications at scale;
  • Understand the relationship of these services with the lower level systems stacks - filesystems, network, memory management, kernel internals, etc;
  • Have deep operational and maintenance experience with very large and complex public facing web hosting systems;
  • Can autonomously architect, prototype, and maintain solutions to different problems and hosting requirements;
  • Possess extreme attention to detail and strive for unparalleled operational excellence;
  • Are open and available for a 2-3 week post-COVID travel per year to meet up with your teammates in person.
Want to know more about how we do things?


We are looking to expand our team and aim to reflect and expand on the diversity of Automatticians currently working with us. At Automattic, we value diversity and know that different perspectives will ensure our team is innovative and creative thinking.

 If you’re reading this on a site other than automattic.com please ensure you visit automattic.com/work-with-us for the latest details on applying.

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 2000 Automatticians in 96 countries speaking 120+ 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.