An old friend reached out — she was looking me up and saw that I list my job title as “Happiness Engineer” (she actually read is as “happiness generator”) at Automattic. She was intrigued and asked about what this job was about. The first words that I typed up were actually “glorified tech support”. Which totally does not do my job any justice, because Happiness Engineering is so much more versatile and creative!

A lot of what I do is invisible to the public because I’m interacting with users one-on-one: via email, private support forums, or live chat. I also train new employees in the ways of Happiness (everyone joining Automattic goes through a three-week support rotation) and write and update internal docs.

There are a few things that are public, though, that I could share with my friend as a sample of what I do when I say I’m working. Some of my support replies are in the community forums, so you can check out my forum profile to see what kind of questions Happiness Engineers field.

I also interviewed some of our forum volunteers and those posts (four so far) were published on WordPress.com News blog. Pressing “Publish” on a blog with over 9 million followers was a bit unnerving the first time. The second time was no big deal though: comments on en.blog are generally positive (yay!) and moderating them is a breeze.

So those are some of the things that I do for work. If you have other questions about the Happiness Engineer position, ask in comments or check the job posting (always looking for more people to join!).