Code Wrangler - Support Tooling

At Automattic, we believe in making the web a better place, and making our workplace a happy place. We hope you can join us on this journey! 

To support customers of Automattic products in the WordPress ecosystem, we empower the work of our customer support agents, whom we call Happiness Engineers, through tooling. Code wranglers on our Happiness operations team are essential to our ability to provide fast and stable connections between customers and support. They automate, create, and update custom tools that help Automattic serve our customers in the best way possible. They are heroes because they make Happiness Engineers' jobs easier and more efficient, build tools to provide customer insights to product teams, and continually solve problems to improve the customer experience. 

We’re looking for talented engineers worldwide, excited to help Automattic’s product ecosystem and Happiness team, and join our mission to make the web a better place. 

What have we worked on recently?

• Happiness Assistant Widget is a customizable chat widget that provides a seamless user experience for interacting with a product’s AI assistant.

• Happiness Support API brings together AI and human interactions (Zendesk Messaging) into one conversation stream. It enables product teams to implement a bespoke support experience.

• Happy Schedule is a scheduling tool that empowers our globally distributed Happiness team to achieve our coverage goals without boxing people into predefined work shifts.

• AI classifiers label support interactions as they enter Zendesk to automatically triage and route them to the correct support queues.

• Gutenberg is a new block-level editor with clean abstractions for users, too, not just developers.

• WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform on the web.

• To view more of our recent work, check out our longer product list on Automattic.com.

How do we work?

• We’re kind to each other and our users – we strive to build a positive, supportive, and inclusive culture of cohesive teams focused on delivering value to our customers.

• We make up a global, distributed workforce, resulting in a unique way of working built around our creed. 

• We offer flexible work arrangements, allowing our team members to work when they feel best.

• We are open-source! We’re cool with open-sourcing everything except passwords, or secret keys.

• We ship often, deploying many times daily with the help of peer code review, continuous integration, and our global workforce in over 90 countries.

• We welcome collaboration, and you can be involved in any discussion across our many communication channels.

Enough about us, let’s talk more about you. The Software Engineer position might be a good fit if you:

• Have production experience with several programming languages. We mostly use PHP and JavaScript at Automattic. You should either be familiar with them already, or the idea of using them on a daily basis should not be a blocker for you.

• Have experience working on a large-scale system—making it faster, more scalable, and fault-tolerant.

• Know about systems architecture.

• Are highly collaborative and love participating in code reviews and discussions about architecture or design.

• Are passionate about and experienced in software development; in particular, advanced JavaScript knowledge is a plus.

• Are knowledgeable about design patterns and testability; experience with testing frameworks, performance testing, and unit testing is very welcome.

• Are thoughtful about product design, with good user experience instincts.

• Are open and able to travel 3-4 weeks per year to meet up with your teammates in person. 

Extra credit:

• Experience building and improving internal tools.

• Experience developing customer support workflows and solutions.

• Managing the support experience across different products.

• Understanding metrics and impact to measure effective customer support.

• Experience with Zendesk and Webhooks.

• Experience integrating AI into existing products.

• WordPress programming experience.

• Open source contributions or contributions to programs designed to help. underrepresented people enter the tech field.

Speaking of interests and skills, here are some areas in which you can grow and have further impact in the future at the company:

• Leadership: We offer a variety of leadership options to those who have interest, including becoming a team lead and managing releases.

• Learning and development:We have a generous personal development budget and encourage you to grow your skills through courses, books, and conferences.

• Architecture:  We encourage developers to develop expertise in the systems they work with, guide their evolution and mentor other developers working on them.

• Engineering effectiveness:  We believe in helping other developers become more effective through tools, practices, cross-team collaborations, and process improvements.

These are exciting times at Automattic, and you’ll have a unique opportunity to shape the future of our products. Join us! We look forward to hearing from you.

Curious who works in engineering at Automattic? Meet our Code Wranglers – Brandon, Jeremy, Mark, Jennifer, Roy and Kat! 

What to Expect:

We know applying to jobs can be stressful and we want to ease the stress by giving clear expectations upfront about 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. 

Please note that we pay extra attention to your answers to the questions in the application form. They are a significant part of the hiring process, and we will review them just like we would review any other step of the hiring process. We’re always iterating, so if you happen to join us in the process, please feel free to offer feedback on what else we can include there!

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.

This isn’t your typical work-from-home job—we are a fully-remote company with an open vacation policy. Read more about our compensation 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.