Software Engineer

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WP Engine empowers companies and agencies of all sizes to build, power, manage, and optimize their WordPress websites and applications with confidence. Serving 1.5 million customers across 150+ countries, the global technology company provides premium, enterprise-grade solutions, tools, and services, including specialized platforms for WordPress, industry-tailored eCommerce and agency solution suites, and developer-centric tools like Local, Advanced Custom Fields, and more. WP Engine’s innovative technology and industry-leading expertise are why 8% of the web visits a WP Engine-powered site daily. Learn more at wpengine.com.

What is cool about this job

As a Software Engineer in Platform Engineering, you will build and operate services that are part of a large-scale, global cloud platform.

The role combines backend software engineering with practical platform awareness. You will work with distributed systems, cloud services, and production environments, taking ownership of well-defined services and capabilities from implementation through deployment and operation.

You do not need to be an expert in every platform technology. We are looking for engineers with solid software engineering fundamentals, hands-on production experience, and the curiosity to grow their cloud and distributed systems expertise.

The Day-to-Day

• Build, test, deploy, and maintain backend services and platform capabilities.

• Develop and integrate APIs using established service and architecture patterns.

• Work with relational data stores and contribute to reliable data access and service integration patterns.

• Contribute to event-driven and asynchronous workflows, including message-based processing and background jobs.

• Run and support services across cloud and platform environments, including managed cloud services, containers, virtual machines, and other runtime models.

• Use CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code workflows to deliver changes safely and repeatably.

• Use logs, metrics, and traces to understand application behavior and diagnose production issues.

• Participate in technical design discussions, ADRs, RFCs, and code reviews, asking questions and contributing practical implementation feedback.

• Own defined areas of work and collaborate with more experienced engineers on broader architectural or cross-team decisions.

• Use AI-assisted engineering tools to speed up development, improve testing, explore codebases, and investigate technical problems.

Your Expertise

Solid software engineering fundamentals and hands-on experience building backend services or web platforms.

Go is preferred for many modern platform services, but strong experience with another backend language is equally relevant if you can learn new technologies quickly.

You should be comfortable with:

• Building and integrating HTTP APIs, particularly REST-based services.

• Working with RPC or service-to-service communication patterns; experience with gRPC is a plus.

• Relational databases and SQL, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

• Writing readable, maintainable, and testable code.

• Unit and integration testing, debugging, and safe production changes.

• Version control and collaborative Git-based development workflows.

Experience with Go, PHP, Ruby, or Python is useful. We care more about your engineering fundamentals and ability to work across a mixed technology environment than expertise in one language.

Practical exposure to public cloud or modern platform environments. Experience with either GCP or AWS is valuable.

You should understand or have hands-on experience with:

• Core cloud concepts around compute, networking, storage, identity, and managed services.

• Operating applications in at least one public cloud environment, preferably GCP or AWS.

• Containers and Docker.

• Basic orchestration concepts; practical Kubernetes experience is useful but not required to be expert level.

• Infrastructure as Code concepts and working with existing Terraform modules or similar tooling.

• Different runtime models, including managed cloud services, containers, and virtual machines.

Experience with services such as Pub/Sub, IAM, Cloud SQL, GKE, EC2, S3, or equivalent cloud services is useful.

We expect you to learn new services as your area of ownership evolves.

Distributed Systems & Architecture

You should understand the fundamentals of distributed systems and have practical exposure to at least some of the following concepts:

• Event-driven and message-based systems.

• Asynchronous processing and background workflows.

• Queues, publish/subscribe patterns, and service integration.

• Retries, idempotency, and basic failure handling.

• Scalability and service dependencies.

• Data consistency and eventual consistency at a conceptual level.

• Performance and latency considerations.

• Clear service boundaries and separation of responsibilities.

At this level, we expect you to implement and improve distributed system patterns within your area, recognize common failure modes, and contribute to design decisions with support from senior engineers when the scope becomes broader or highly complex.

You understand that shipping software includes running and supporting it in production.

You should have practical experience with:

• CI/CD pipelines and automated delivery workflows.

• Working with Infrastructure as Code in an existing codebase.

• Monitoring and basic alerting.

• Using logs and metrics to diagnose application issues.

• Basic distributed tracing concepts and following requests across services.

• Participating in production incident investigation and root-cause analysis.

• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Google Cloud Operations, Prometheus, Datadog, or similar tooling is useful.

• We care primarily about your ability to investigate how a production system behaves and find the right signals when something goes wrong.

You understand the basic security responsibilities of an engineer building cloud and platform services.

You should be familiar with:

• Identity and Access Management concepts.

• Authentication and authorization fundamentals.

• OAuth or OpenID Connect concepts.

• Secrets and credentials management.

• Least privilege and basic cloud security practices.

You apply sound engineering practices and are continuing to develop your technical judgment.

You should be familiar with:

• SOLID principles and common design patterns.

• Code review and collaborative development.

• Automated testing and maintainable code.

• Technical documentation and contributing to ADR or RFC-style discussions.

• Breaking work into deliverable increments and communicating technical risks.

• Taking ownership of defined services, features, and production outcomes within your area.

We expect engineers to use modern AI tools thoughtfully as part of their development workflow.

This may include using AI to:

• Accelerate implementation and reduce repetitive work.

• Explore unfamiliar code and documentation.

• Generate or improve tests.

• Support debugging and problem investigation.

• Summarize logs, errors, or technical context.

• Compare implementation approaches.

• You remain responsible for validating AI-assisted output and for the quality, security, and maintainability of the code you deliver.

The Mindset We Value

We are looking for engineers who demonstrate:

• Ownership: You take responsibility for your area of work and follow changes through to production outcomes.

• Customer focus: You consider the impact of your work on customers and other engineering teams.

• Pragmatism: You choose practical solutions and ask for context when trade-offs are unclear.

• Quality: You care about testing, maintainability, reliability, and operational readiness.

• Curiosity: You want to understand how systems work beyond the immediate code you are changing.

• Communication: You share progress, raise risks early, and collaborate constructively with others.

• Growth: You actively build deeper skills in cloud platforms, distributed systems, and technical design.

We value solid engineering fundamentals, production ownership, and the ability to grow into increasingly complex platform and distributed systems problems.

• Perks and Benefits

• Company Stock Options (Every employee is an owner in the company)

• Health Benefits (LuxMed Premium Rehab + Dentistry III)

• Pension Scheme with a match

• Life Insurance, 100% premium paid by WP Engine

• Free Multisport Card - Light and Classic

• Short-Term Disability & Sick Leave: 100% salary coverage for the first 33 days

• Employee Assistance Program

• Generous Vacation Time (Who doesn’t like time off)

• 1 floating holiday

• 4 Company Wellness Days

• Home Office Stipend

• On-going education through LinkedIn Learning, Workday Learning and our Career Growth Portal

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We believe that compensation should be reflective of the impact you have within the organization relative to the market value of your role. The estimated base salary range for this position is as listed above. Some roles may also be eligible for overtime pay. Our salary ranges are determined by job role and responsibilities and level. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for salaries for the position nationwide. The actual base pay will vary based on various factors including job-related skills and individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process. Your talent acquisition partner can share more about the total rewards package at WP Engine including any additional total rewards components such as equity, variable pay plans (if applicable), and benefits during the hiring process.