We are looking for a Vice President to lead our internet-scale, high-performance technical platform. We serve billions of requests per day for our 100,000 customers; every day, 5% of the 3.5B online people visit at least one WP Engine-hosted property. In this role, you are responsible for continuously improving our platform's performance in speed, uptime, security, and cost-efficiency.

As the Vice President of Platform Engineering, you will guide and grow our nine engineering teams to be hyper-focused on the uptime and execution speed of our infrastructure and customer sites. Performance is a product at WP Engine, and this role will work closely with our product team to devise and execute our performance strategy.

You will lead a diverse team through highly technical problems, to achieve financial and operational goals. It will require someone who can build and lead a high achieving team, being technically proficient enough to be comfortable with the scale & scope of our farm, collaborating with our cloud partners, leading the organization's transformation to the SRE model, and driving operational efficiency. You will own the development and execution of our global hiring strategy.

Primary Responsibilities

• Responsible for defining, achieving, and refining SLOs.

• Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering leaders to ensure that operational and reliability requirements are clearly articulated and integrated into the product roadmap.

• Implement a world-class continuous improvement process that includes incident analysis, prioritizing and implementing improvements, and ongoing emphasis on automation and prevention.

• Deliver risk assessment, management, and identifying mitigation associated with ongoing operations and planned releases.

• Direct responsibility for the PaaS Operations, 24/7 Technical Operations, and Cloud Engineering functions which include cost management and identifies alternative approaches for cost reduction

• Responsible for building standard methodologies and working with product on SRE strategy and direction.

• Clearly define scope, objectives, and approach and develops a clear detailed plan for the execution of technical projects.

• Defines changes to system architecture to improve system performance and scale.

• Responsible for capacity-planning for all components of the production services.

• Lead and grow a globally distributed team.

• Identify points of failure and work with the engineering team to build resiliency as table stakes in our services

Expected Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years' experience in a senior leadership role in a 24/7/365 environment

• AWS and Google Cloud Platform experience is a plus

• Deep knowledge and hands-on experience with hosted operations, including data centers, networking, databases, operating systems, monitoring tools, etc.

• Experience leading a 24x7 on-call environment, requiring the knowledge of processes and tools. 

• Conducting retrospectives and identifying remediation and automation

• Strong Industry knowledge and trends, and the latest features of AWS/GCP, SaaS, and Cloud applications

• Ability to resolve conflicts effectively

• Strong leadership skills and follow-through, focused and detail-oriented

• Direct experience building teams with strong automation mindset

• Excellent ability to communicate effectively with folks across technical and non-technical functions

• Experience managing Site Reliability Engineers and Software development engineers

• Hands-on experience in developing and executing a detailed change management process for highly-available environments

• Experience interacting with customers directly with a strong dedication to customer success

The perks & benefits

• Compensation (We offer market competitive salaries)
• Stock Options (Every employee is an owner in the company)
• Health Benefits (100% Paid Employee Medical, Dental, and Vision)
• IVF Benefits
• Paid Family Leave - 16 weeks for primary caregivers and 5 weeks for secondary caregivers fully paid
• 4% 401(k) Match (Make the most of retirement)
• Life and Disability Insurance (100% Paid Life, STD, LTD, and AD&D)
• Generous Vacation Time (Who doesn't like time off?)
• Transportation (24x7 Downtown parking or commuter reimbursement)
• Lunch (Provided Tuesday – Thursday)
• Gym membership discount

WP Engine is an Equal Opportunity Employer. As a US employer, WP Engine is required to verify all employees, regardless of citizenship or national origin, are eligible to work in the United States.

At WP Engine, we strive to have the broadest possible view of diversity, going beyond visible differences to include the background, experiences, skills, and perspectives that make each person unique. WP Engine is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, Veteran status, or any other basis protected by federal, state, or local law. ​