At Automattic, we have a Creed. This is the fourth line:

I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers.

Customers are central to everything we do. The Happiness Engineer title aims to capture how seriously we take that work. In 2007, when Matt Mullenweg posted Automattic’s first Happiness Engineer job listing, he described the role like this:

We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it is the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need.

At the time, Matt paid close attention to Tony Hsieh of Zappos, where customer happiness wasn’t merely a metric, it was the whole business. Matt wasn’t going to call it Support. We focus on outcomes at Automattic, and the outcome he wanted was happiness. 

Meanwhile, Automattic at that time was mostly engineers. Matt wanted every person at Automattic on equal footing. When he posted that first job listing for a Happiness Engineer, he did not mean engineer in the sense of code and credentials. He meant engineer in the deepest sense of the word: someone who does not just solve problems but asks whether the problem needed to exist in the first place. The best engineers are not the ones who answer the most tickets. They are the ones who build the solution that means the ticket never gets created again. Helping a small business owner resolve their site’s issue at 2:00 A.M. is as important as writing the code that powers it.

Minutes after the first job listing went live, a colleague wrote back: “Happiness Engineer. I like that.”

Nearly two decades later, so does everyone else. For me, it’s the greatest job title I’ll ever have. It’s aspirational. It inspires me to engineer happiness for the people I serve, whether those people are customers, team members, peers, or other Automatticians. Happiness Engineers debug, investigate, and advocate for customers. They often know more about how our products work in the real world than anyone else in the company.