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Customer Success Engineer, VIP

Automattic

Fully Remote
Remote
Worldwide
US hours

Hirezar Summary for South African Applicants

This fully remote full time position at Automattic is open worldwide, so South Africans can apply. As a remote position, you can work from anywhere in South Africa — whether you're based in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, or a smaller town.

Job Description

<p><a href="https://wpvip.com/">WordPress VIP</a>, the enterprise division of <a href="https://automattic.com/">Automattic</a>, is the world's leading agile content management platform. Our suite of open solutions and services brings the ease and agility of <a href="https://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a> to the heart of the world’s largest enterprises. Our large and growing ecosystem of technologies, services, and integrations is designed to bring the freedom and power of open source to our customers, which include Meta, CNN, Salesforce, and hundreds more.</p>
<p>The Customer Success Engineer role is responsible for providing advanced technical support and consultation to our enterprise customers. In this customer-facing role, you will handle complex technical challenges, provide architectural guidance, and solve mission-critical problems with customer deployments and applications. You’ll work primarily through Zendesk tickets, while also participating in customer calls, to advance longer-term technical initiatives and build trusted customer relationships.</p>
<p>You’ll serve as a technical resource for both customers and internal teams, bridging support and specialized engineering functions during high-impact situations. Support is provided 24/7, so scheduled weekday and weekend shifts, as well as some holiday and evening availability, will be a requirement. Our customers are global and rely on our team to provide expedient support at any time of day.</p>
<h4>About You</h4>
<ul>
<li>You are an engineer who thrives on solving real-world problems. You may have a background in full-stack development, enterprise support, or media technology, and you’re ready to apply your technical skills directly with a wide spectrum of interesting global customers.</li>
<li>You never stop learning. You have a willingness to rapidly learn new technologies, and are excited by the challenge of debugging complex, unfamiliar applications.</li>
<li>You are curious and love to get to the root cause of an issue. You’re not satisfied with surface-level fixes and are driven to solve problems not once, but twice: fixing the immediate issue, and preventing it from happening again.</li>
<li>You have excellent written English and can effectively communicate technical concepts to customers and colleagues, sometimes under stressful circumstances. <a href="https://automattic.com/creed/">Communication is our oxygen</a> and the basis of everything we do.</li>
<li>You like actively solving problems. You are excited by engaging regularly in deep, collaborative problem-solving, and motivated by what you learn along the way.</li>
<li>You are obsessed with helping others succeed, and love working directly with customers. Experience in an enterprise support environment is highly valued.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Technical Requirements</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>WordPress expertise</strong> with a solid understanding of the underlying codebase, themes, plugins, block editor, e-commerce, WP-CLI, hooks and filters, imports, and other advanced WordPress concepts.</li>
<li><strong>Proficient in reading, writing, and troubleshooting code </strong>in multiple languages, including HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.</li>
<li><strong>Understanding of web technologies</strong> including REST APIs, HTTP, DNS, domain management, reverse proxy, and version control (primarily Git, also SVN).</li>
<li><strong>Experience with software engineering practices,</strong> including coding standards, team coding practices, source control, build processes, testing methodologies, and cloud infrastructures.</li>
<li><strong>Advanced understanding of scalability, performance, and security issues</strong> in enterprise environments.</li>
<li><strong>Proficiency with monitoring and debugging tools</strong> such as Kibana and New Relic.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Requirements</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>US-based position.</strong> Candidates must be based in the United States and undergo background checks as required, and hold United States citizenship.</li>
<li><strong>Excellent communication skills.</strong> We’re a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_collaboration">distributed team</a>, so frequent and clear written communication is crucial. You must be able to explain complex technical issues in accessible ways.</li>
<li><strong>Self-motivated work ethic.</strong> Self-starters who love taking initiative and seeing things through to completion do well on our teams.</li>
<li><strong>Advanced troubleshooting abilities.</strong> You can take complex problems and break them down into manageable pieces with elegant solutions.</li>
<li><strong>Experience in customer-facing roles</strong> in an enterprise support environment.</li>
</ul>
<h4>What to Expect</h4>
<p>Your day-to-day work will include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Providing high-quality technical support and consultation through Zendesk tickets and customer calls.</li>
<li>Handling complex and urgent customer situations, including incident response and escala

Tips for South African Applicants

Timezone Advantage

South Africa (SAST, UTC+2) overlaps well with European business hours and has a few hours of overlap with US East Coast. Mention your timezone flexibility in your application.

Salary in Context

Even without a listed salary, international remote roles typically pay 2-3x more than equivalent local positions in South Africa due to the exchange rate advantage.

Application Tips

Tailor your CV to international standards — use a clean format, highlight remote work experience, and include your English proficiency. Many SA applicants succeed by emphasising their strong work ethic and cultural adaptability.

Load Shedding Preparedness

If you're applying for a remote role, having a backup power solution (UPS, inverter, or generator) and mobile data as a backup internet connection shows employers you're prepared for South Africa's infrastructure challenges.

About Automattic

Automattic is a company in the Account Executive industry that hires remote workers from South Africa. They currently have 16 open positions on Hirezar. View all Automattic jobs →