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.

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.

Forward Deployed Engineer

Anywhere in the world

Remote

Senior

Automattic