Support Engineer, VIP

WordPress VIP, the enterprise division of Automattic, is the world’s leading agile content management platform. Our suite of open solutions and services brings the ease and agility of WordPress to the world’s largest enterprises. Our large and growing ecosystem of technologies, services, and integrations is designed to bring the freedom and power of open source to our customers, who include Meta, CNN, Salesforce, and hundreds more.

The Support Engineer role is responsible for providing advanced technical support to our enterprise customers, serving as an escalation point for complex issues that require deeper investigation. In this customer-facing role, you will handle challenging debugging scenarios, troubleshoot intricate application and platform issues, and help resolve problems that go beyond standard support workflows. You’ll work primarily through Zendesk tickets, collaborating closely with Support Engineers and Customer Success Engineers to ensure timely, high-quality resolutions while building your technical expertise and customer relationships.

You’ll serve as a technical resource for both customers and internal teams, bridging support and specialized engineering functions in high-impact situations. Support is provided 24/7, so scheduled weekday and weekend shifts, on-call rotations, as well as some holiday and evening availability, will be a requirement. Our customers are global and rely on our team to provide expedient support at any time of day.

About You

• You are a technical problem-solver who thrives on helping customers. You may have a background in WordPress development, technical support, or agency work, and you’re ready to take on more complex challenges while continuing to build your engineering skills. You enjoy the variety of working with a wide spectrum of interesting global customers.
• You never stop learning. You have a willingness to rapidly learn new technologies and deepen your expertise in areas like PHP, JavaScript, and the WordPress ecosystem. You’re excited by the challenge of debugging unfamiliar applications and expanding your technical toolkit.
• You are curious and love to dig deeper. When an issue is escalated to you, you’re not satisfied with surface-level fixes. You’re driven to understand the root cause and to document what you learn, so the team can benefit from your investigation.
• Communication is our oxygen and the basis of everything we do. You have excellent written English and can communicate technical concepts to customers and colleagues, even when things go wrong. You know how to translate complex debugging findings into clear, actionable guidance. You like actively solving problems, and helping others solve them too. You enjoy collaborative troubleshooting, whether that’s pairing with a Support Engineer on a tricky ticket, or consulting with a CSE on a deeper platform issue. Customer support, and what you learn solving customer problems, drive you.
• You are passionate about customer success and team growth. You love working directly with customers and find satisfaction in mentoring teammates. Experience in a technical support environment—especially enterprise WordPress support—is highly valued.

Technical Requirements

• WordPress expertise with a solid understanding of core concepts, including themes, plugins, hooks and filters, WP-CLI, imports, and common troubleshooting patterns. Familiarity with the block editor (Gutenberg) and ecommerce solutions (WooCommerce) is a plus.
• Proficient in reading and troubleshooting code in multiple languages, including HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. You should be comfortable navigating unfamiliar codebases to identify issues and able to write small code snippets or patches when needed.
• Understanding of web technologies, including REST APIs, HTTP, DNS, domain management, and version control (primarily Git). Familiarity with reverse proxy configurations and caching layers is helpful but not required.
• Familiarity with software engineering practices, including coding standards, source control workflows, and basic testing concepts. Experience working alongside engineering teams or contributing to team repositories is valued.
• Solid understanding of performance and scalability concepts in WordPress environments, including common causes of slow queries, caching strategies, and resource optimization. Security awareness and familiarity with common vulnerabilities are welcome but not required.
• Comfortable using monitoring and debugging tools such as New Relic, Kibana, or similar platforms to investigate application behavior, identify errors, and trace performance issues.

Requirements

• US-based position. Candidates must be based in the United States, undergo background checks as required, and hold American citizenship.
• Self-motivated and collaborative work ethic. Self-starters who love taking initiative and seeing things through to completion do well on our teams. 
• Strong troubleshooting abilities. You can take complex problems and break them down systematically, identifying root causes through methodical investigation. You know how to gather the right information, isolate variables, and work toward resolution—or clearly document your findings when escalating.
• Experience in customer-facing technical roles. You’ve worked directly with customers in a support, agency, or consulting environment, and understand how to balance technical accuracy with clear, empathetic communication. Experience in enterprise WordPress support or a similar environment where customers expect fast, personal responses is an advantage.

What to Expect

Your day-to-day work will include:

• Providing high-quality technical support and consultation through Zendesk tickets and customer calls.
• Handling escalated customer issues that require deeper investigation, including urgent tickets and complex debugging scenarios.
• In-depth debugging that requires close examination of logs, analysis of customer codebases, and collaboration with engineering teams.
• Providing technical guidance to customers on WordPress best practices, performance optimization, and common implementation patterns.
• Building and updating internal and customer-facing documentation.
• Contributing to the continuous improvement of our platform, processes, and customer experience.

Support is provided 24/7, so scheduled weekday and weekend shifts, as well as some holiday and evening availability, will be a requirement. There will be on-call rotations involving work with government contracts.

Salary range: $xx,xxx – Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency.

What to Expect from Our Process

We know that applying to jobs can be stressful, and we want to ease the anxiety by providing clear expectations up front about what to expect from 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. We’re always iterating, so please feel free to offer feedback on what else we can include there to improve the hiring experience.

About the Team

We are foremost engineers, though our backgrounds and experiences in life and career vary. We typically have a deep background in either WordPress development itself (some of us are long-time developers/contributors, experienced themers, or plugin developers) and/or the web (others of us are devs with backgrounds in media or general technology). All of us have a deep interest in code and learning, plus a commitment to open source, WordPress, and the future of the open web.

As passionate advocates for our customers, we are unafraid of ambiguous or challenging situations involving code, people,, or both. We understand the wider and human contexts of technical decisions and are able to communicate effectively across cultures and organizations, even in difficult situations.. We are most engaged when solving truly interesting problems collaboratively. We care about our customers and share a commitment to helping them achieve their business and creative goals. #LI-DNI