Forward Deployed Engineer

Details

At WordPress VIP (part of Automattic), we power the most influential properties on the web. This role is an advanced, consultative engineering position where you operate as a hands-on architect and embedded technical partner with strategic customers to solve high-stakes technical challenges and drive expansion.

About the Team

The Customer Engineering and Architecture (CEA) team at WordPress VIP works directly with our most important customers to ensure they achieve 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.

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 will dive deep into customer architectures, identify and resolve complex technical challenges, and shape scalable solutions that drive long-term adoption and expansion. This is not a pure support or implementation role — it’s a hands-on architect, trusted advisor, and growth catalyst role.

Responsibilities

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.
• Identify and solve complex architectural and technical problems.
• Partner with customers as they leverage VIP’s support capabilities to fully utilize VIP's high-availability support.
• Conduct technical discovery and design sessions; produce architecture recommendations, migration plans, and implementation guidance.
• Maximize customer 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 Professional Services teams.
• Define scopes of work (SOWs) for technical expansion projects, collaborating 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 tooling and process improvements, including delivery platforms, AI workflows, and documentation systems (e.g., Rocketlane, Notion, or similar).

Contribute to the FDE Practice

• Use data to 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 leadership to expand the practice into a repeatable, revenue-driving function.

Requirements

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 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 — comfortable in both debugging sessions and executive briefings.
• 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 to rapidly understand diverse architectures and technologies.
• Customer empathy and the ability to translate needs into actionable technical and business outcomes.
• Problem ownership and commercial awareness.
• Learning agility and strong collaboration with Services, Support, Product, and Commercial teams.

Compensation & Work Policy

• Salary range: $180,000 - $230,000 USD (global range; paid in local currency).
• Fully remote company with an open vacation policy. Benefits vary by country (links provided in the posting).

About Automattic

Automattic is a distributed company with more than 1500 employees globally. We believe in Open Source and support many products (WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, etc.). Automattic is an Equal Opportunity employer and provides disability-related accommodations during the application process. The company participates in E-Verify in certain locations as required by law.

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