Process
Great async process. Everything happens on Slack, and the feedback loop is great. They give you feedback!
Async remote culture looks really nice; this is where they shine.
A few red flags:
- You're expected to do customer service one week per year.
- The interview is very long.
- You need to work 40 hours, which is paid at a very low hourly rate. At the end, they got a useless task done; I received less than 1/5 my hourly rate.
I think it would make more sense to do an actual valuable project together and pay it market rate, instead of doing an exercise.
The code project you're given is an old project, and it's pretty bad – which is fine, it can be part of the exercise. The solution you're guided towards, though, uses a library from Automattic (basically Redux with some extra functionalities and little documentation). Frankly, it's like coding frontend in 2015. I definitely wouldn't want to maintain that.
That made me worry about the code quality inside Automattic and, frankly, it was enough to make me not want to join. It felt like the interview was going well, but apparently my perception wasn't correct.
The flow was:
- You're given a fairly easy task.
- You open a PR and send your changes.
- You write a blog post explaining decisions.
- You get feedback and questions on your output.
There was a corner case/usability problem in my implementation. I received some feedback and implemented the solution. I didn't think much of it, as it felt like normal work on a task, and I thought it was cool to test work interactions as opposed to the usual "write this LeetCode problem."
A new task came up. The reviewer asked for some more behavior changes. I found a corner case reproducible only on Slow 3G and decided to halt the interview, citing the corner cases flagged up and asking for more in-depth analysis in the blog post.
Overall, a nice experience and seriously one of the best processes and cultures across all companies I've seen in 18 years in the field. I think the interview is passable and on the easy side; just be sure to triple-check everything instead of focusing on interacting with the reviewer.
From the outside, it sounds like a great company, but I would not recommend joining because of the code quality.
Questions
Find bugs and security issues in this project.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Automattic Frontend Engineer role in Cyprus.
Success Rate
Automattic's interview process for their Frontend Engineer roles in Cyprus is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having mixed feelings for Automattic's Frontend Engineer interview process in Cyprus.
Automattic Work Experiences
- 4.0Friendly Culture, Developing ProcessesJavascript Developer • Current EmployeeLisbon, Lisbon, PortugalOctober 12, 2025Pros: The company culture is very friendly, but with strong issues to provide visibility about performance.Cons: The processes not related to writing code are still in development, with no well-defined approach.
- 2.0I loved this companySenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeOctober 8, 2025Pros: A real remote job with async communication.Cons: I used to love this job, but in the past few months, everything has been falling apart. There’s constant confusion. Leadership changes direction every few days, and no one takes responsibility; it always ends up on the ICs. Collaboration with design and product teams is also completely broken.
- 1.0Stagnant Tech, Career LimiterSenior Software Engineer • Former EmployeeNew York, New York, United StatesSeptember 11, 2025Pros: Remote work, but remote and hybrid opportunities are everywhere still if you're looking beyond the largest few companies.Cons: It's hard to properly communicate how career-limiting a long stint at Automattic can be for a software engineer. Automattic's tech stack was outdated 10 years ago, and there's been little movement since then. They're really good at running simplistic WordPress sites performantly, but anything beyond that is a hot mess. Good luck passing a system design interview when you're drawing on the experience of hacking some code into the WPCOM monolith, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best (did I mention there's no test environment or system test capabilities?). And I'm not suggesting resume-driven design here. The tech stack and tooling has a real concrete impact on engineering velocity and innovation. Many product-level decisions died in ideation because we didn't have an immediate path forward and knew advocating it with Systems would be a job killer. The impact to the business and product quality is incalculable. As an aside, I'll mention that I have no problem with PHP. Plenty of companies value PHP, but Automattic is not using modern frameworks and rarely using good design patterns. Even many WordPress companies are doing better. The teams are facing some incredible engineering challenges. It's incredibly hard to create and scale features supporting millions of sites all running in their own environments alongside any number of custom plugins. Quality is almost impossible to control given the myriad of environments and poor access to critical metrics. I don't believe there is a profitable solution that allows continued growth. There's a reason the whole industry has moved to SaaS. Without crystal clear focus/strategy and strong leadership, it's an intractable problem. Unfortunately, Automattic fully lacks the necessary strategic and technical leadership to forge ahead successfully. Since there's almost no built-in career growth here, Automattic's handbook will tell you to "choose your own adventure" in your career here: choose wisely and skip Automattic all together. You cannot and will not do the best work of your career here.
