Forward Deployed Engineer

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Forward Deployed Engineer (WordPress VIP Customer Engineering & Architecture)

At WordPress VIP (part of Automattic), we power the most influential properties on the web, from the White House to Meta and Salesforce. We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join our mission in redefining how the world’s largest enterprises scale.

This isn't your typical engineering role; it’s an advanced, consultative position where you operate as a hands-on architect and a growth catalyst. As an FDE, you are the front line of trust, embedded with our most strategic customers to solve high-stakes technical challenges in real-time. By combining engineering excellence with deep customer proximity, you won’t just solve problems for customers, you’ll solve them with them, driving business expansion across the world’s most scaled environments. If you thrive in high-impact, ambiguous environments and want to help define the future of open-source technology at the enterprise level, we want to talk to you.

About the Team

The Customer Engineering and Architecture (CEA) team at WordPress VIP works directly with our most important customers to ensure they achieve their core technical outcomes and expand their investment in WordPress, VIP, and Automattic.

The team’s mission is to drive measurable technical success and long-term growth for VIP’s largest customers through a hands-on, scalable Forward Deployed Engineering practice that combines deep technical partnership with rapid, high-impact solutioning.

Role Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you will serve as an embedded technical partner to one or more complex WordPress VIP customers in Media, Enterprise, and Government.

You’ll work at the intersection of engineering, consulting, and customer success—diving deep into customer architectures, identifying and resolving complex technical challenges, and shaping scalable solutions that drive long-term adoption and expansion.

This is not a pure support or implementation role. It’s an advanced, consultative engineering position where you’ll operate as a hands-on architect, a trusted advisor, and a growth catalyst, helping customers succeed with WordPress VIP and related open-source technologies.

What You’ll Do

Deliver Customer Technical Outcomes

• Engage directly with large VIP customers (often embedded in their teams) to ensure successful adoption, integration, and scaling of WordPress VIP solutions.
• Directly identify and solve complex architectural and technical problems.
• Partner with customers as they leverage VIP’s support capabilities, ensuring they fully utilize VIP's high-availability support.
• Conduct technical discovery and design sessions, producing architecture recommendations, migration plans, and implementation guidance.
• Maximize the customer’s value from VIP’s platform, integrations, and partner ecosystem.

Drive Expansion Through Services-Led Growth

• Identify and shape professional services opportunities through ongoing technical engagement. Document and refer engagements to other VIP PS teams.
• Define scopes of work (SOWs) for technical expansion projects, collaborating closely with Services, Account Management, and Commercial teams.
• Participate in presales and renewal discussions as the technical voice of confidence and credibility.

Hold and Share Deep Customer Context

• Maintain a living technical knowledge base of customer architectures, deployments, and patterns.
• Act as the internal authority on assigned customer environments, proactively identifying risks and opportunities.
• Contribute to team-wide tooling and process improvements, including delivery platforms, AI workflows, and documentation systems (e.g., Rocketlane, Notion, or similar).

Contribute to the Forward Deployed Engineering Practice

• Using data, help refine the operating model for FDE engagements, balancing presence, value, and scalability.
• Experiment with and adopt AI-assisted workflows to improve delivery efficiency and insight generation.
• Collaborate with the leadership to expand the practice into a repeatable, revenue-driving function.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in web or application engineering, minimally in PHP and/or JavaScript.
• Strong familiarity with WordPress at scale, including common architectures, REST APIs, caching/CDNs, performance optimization, integration methods and security hardening.
• Experience working directly with large customers in technical consulting, architecture, or professional services.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues in distributed or high-traffic environments.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills: equally comfortable in a debugging session and an executive briefing.
• Commercial mindset: ability to spot opportunities for value expansion and articulate ROI to non-technical stakeholders.

Ideal

• Experience with WordPress VIP, enterprise hosting, or similar SaaS/PaaS platforms.
• Prior experience as a solutions architect, senior developer, or forward deployed engineer in a consulting or SaaS/PaaS context.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development, observability tools, and modern DevOps practices (CI/CD, GitHub Actions, etc.).
• Domain experience in Government, Media, or Enterprise.

Key Competencies

• Technical Depth & Breadth: Rapidly understand diverse architectures and technologies.
• Customer Empathy: Translate customer needs into actionable technical and business outcomes.
• Problem Ownership: Take responsibility for technical success, even beyond formal scope.
• Commercial Awareness: Balance engineering rigor with business objectives.
• Learning Agility: Continuously adapt to new tools, patterns, and customer contexts.
• Collaboration: Work fluidly with Services, Support, Product, and Commercial teams to deliver holistic outcomes.

Salary range: $180,000-$230,000 USD.  Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency.

We are searching for high-caliber candidates with the skills and qualities to have a net positive for Automattic. Pay will reflect the potential contribution and the impact you can bring, which may, in some cases, go beyond the range stated.

This isn’t your typical work-from-home job—we are a fully-remote company with an open vacation policy. Read more about ourcompensation philosophy. To see a full list of benefits by country, consult our Benefits Page. And check out these links to learn more about How We Hire and What We Expect from Ourselves. #LI-DNI

About Automattic

Now in our 20th year, we’re the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Beeper, 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 1500 Automatticians in nearly every corner of the globe, speaking over a hundred different languages. Enriched by this diversity, we’re united by a singular mission: to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging so anyone with a story can tell it, anyone with a product can sell it, and everyone can manage their communications from a single source. In short, we help maintain a balance in society, creating and continually refining powerful tools people can use to compete fairly—regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world.

We believe in Open Source, and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL. Automattic is a Most Loved Company, an Equal Opportunity employer, and Disability Confident Committed. (Here’s what that might mean for you.) If you need disability-related accommodations during the application or interview process, please fill out this form. We are committed to ensuring an accessible hiring process for all candidates. Learn more about our Employee Resource Groups.

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All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. View the “Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal” poster here. Automattic participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.