Customer Inspired

At WP Engine, we are guided and held accountable by our 5 core values: do the right thing, customer-inspired, where the best get better, built to last, and aspiring to lead, committed to giving back. As WP Engine employees, we always strive to make decisions with these values in mind. This way, we can continue to define and cultivate our company culture. By doing our part to ensure an enjoyable and fulfilling work environment, we are able to better deliver digital experiences for our customers.

In this series, we highlight a WP Engine employee embodying those core values. ‘Customer-Inspired’ means that our customers are at the heart of everything we do. We make decisions, create new products, offer support and more all with the customer in mind. The goal is to provide transparency and peace of mind to our customer’s businesses and lives. With this value in mind, we are able to earn our customer’s trust and turn them into WP Engine advocates.

Today we talk to Jose De La Rosa, Customer Support Level 2 and an essential player in WP Engine’s rollout of SSH Gateway, a product inspired by our customers. 

What brought you to WP Engine?

Several key life events brought me to WP Engine. I served in the military for 6 years and after leaving I attended college for a little while, I quickly realized that wasn’t the best fit for me. I attended a tech training in San Antonio where I acquired some relevant technical skills and in 2015 WP Engine provided me with the opportunity to have a career after leaving the military as a Support Technician.

What has been your career journey at WP Engine?

I started as an L1 Support Technician. About 10 months later, I got promoted to L2. I did that for a couple months but WP Engine and the Support organization was growing. We wanted to build a team that could help our customers who needed extra support. My role as an L2 Support Engineer is a combination of solving technical issues and breaking down the issues to someone who might not be incredibly technical. This helps our customers stayed informed while maintaining transparency in the partnership. I held the L2 role for about 8 months and was promoted to Senior L2. One of my key responsibilities, now, is my role as the subject matter expert on Git, a tool that a lot of our developers use as well as our latest rollout of the SSH Gateway.

What makes WP Engine a great place to work for you?

For me, it’s a combination of getting to work on interesting problems and who WP Engine is as a company. Not only am I frequently challenged by my day-to-day work, but I respect the foundation that WP Engine is built on. I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity have doors open as a result of hard work that leaders at WP Engine have recognized.

What prompted SSH Gateway?  

It was born out of our customers asking for it. Our product teams and R&D decided it was important to move forward with this feature that our customers wanted. We knew it was good for our customers because it would allow them to solve problems more efficiently. It’s also important for us to remain enterprise-grade. By a lot of definitions, enterprise-grade means offering SSH. Finally, it’s an improvement on the WP-CLI access we provide through the user portal.

What kind of benefits does SSH provide the customer?

SSH allows customers to accomplish tasks efficiently through a command line interface ultimately saving them time, effort and headache. You can use it to quickly manage WordPress settings and administration, navigate files and directories, and move and transfer files. There’s also a low barrier to entry, almost anyone with a background in web development will be able to use WP-CLI.

What other benefits does SSH provide?

As more people start to adopt it and spread the word about how they are using it, more users will start to use the software. This will create a demand for more engineers to improve the platform. As a result, improvements will be made to WP-CLI, benefitting the WordPress community as a whole.

What has been the feedback on SSH, so far?

Customers are ecstatic. Many of our customers have been waiting for it to rollout so now that it’s available, they are overjoyed. We’ve also had a lot of customer feedback which has helped us make adjustments and improvements to the platform.

Jason Cohen, WP Engine’s founder, once said to me: “Let’s build the tools and features that our customers ask for.” That’s always really stuck with me. Our efforts are often wasted when operating on assumptions. We always build with our customers in mind and the same is true for SSH.

Dogs or cats?

Cats. I have two, Tobi and Gimli.

Favorite movie?

Toy Story.

For more on SSH, check out our announcement blog. Interested in WP Engine? We are hiring in Technical Support at our Austin, San Antonio and Limerick locations. Check out our careers page for a full list of positions.