Staff DevOps Engineer

Come help us build and maintain world-class CI/CD infrastructure across Automattic. We’re looking for a Staff DevOps Engineer to join the QualityOps team. You’ll own the systems that keep engineers shipping fast and confidently: CI pipelines, test reliability, build tooling, and developer experience. Your work will directly impact how 1,500+ people ship software that powers 40%+ of the web.

What you’ll do:

• Own CI/CD infrastructure. Manage builds and pipelines, guide teams to the right CI tool for the job, and keep everything fast and reliable. You aren’t afraid of legacy configurations; you enjoy the archeology required to modernize massive, long-running build systems.

• Eliminate flakiness. Dig into flaky tests, parallelism side effects, and infrastructure edge cases until green means green.

• Curate the test suite for speed. Aggressively prune tests that don’t test anything, speed up tests that are unnecessarily slow, and enforce quality gates on what gets added.

• Improve developer experience by “walking the floor” to look for friction. Find what slows engineers down and fix it before they have to ask. Balance centralized reliability with developer autonomy.

• Enable engineers to own their tests. Track build times, work with teams to write better and faster tests, and provide frameworks that help engineers improve CI on their own. You’re a force multiplier, not a bottleneck.

• Build release tooling: deploy pipelines, pre-release test gating, and build automated steps that replace manual coordination.

What we’re looking for:

• You lead by shipping, not by planning. You thrive on solving technical bottlenecks.

• Deep experience with CI/CD systems: TeamCity, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Buildkite, or similar. Familiarity with containerized test environments.

• Strong in at least two of: PHP, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Bash.

• Track record of improving build or test reliability at scale. You’ve made a CI pipeline meaningfully faster and can show the before/after—with the metrics to prove it.

• Comfortable debugging flaky tests, parallelism issues, and infrastructure edge cases.

• Clear async communicator who documents decisions and gets work done across time zones.

• Fluent with AI-assisted development workflows. You use tools like Claude Code or Copilot daily, and can lead others in adopting AI for testing, triage, and infrastructure work.

• Self-motivated and able to work with minimal supervision.

Bonus points for:

• Experience eliminating flakiness in a large test suite—and you can talk about what you learned.

• Experience with WordPress, PHP, and MySQL.

• Open-source contributions.

• A history of breaking a stagnant CI culture and restoring engineering trust in the build.

Salary range: $70,000-$170,000 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.

We’re pleased to offer a straightforward, competitive base salary, providing financial clarity without complex variable components. This isn’t your typical work-from-home job: we are a fully-remote company with an open vacation policy. 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-Remote

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.