Karen Alma

After 13 years working on hiring workflows and Talent Acquisition at Automattic, I’ve made a career switch. Not to a new company, but a new chapter inside the same one. I spent the last several years building Automattic’s global Talent function with a lot of iteration, a lot of learning, and a team I genuinely loved working with. It wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always glamorous, and we had our moments of stress and frustration, but it was meaningful. The experience of growing that function, supported by first our CFO, and then our CPO, from nothing into something real and lasting is one of the things I’ll carry with me. I’m really proud of it. 

But over time, I realized I was craving a new challenge. And at just the right time, an opportunity came across my path.

I’ve moved over to the division that we call .Organization. It’s the group that works to connect product, community, and education, ensuring that WordPress continues to grow as a durable infrastructure for the open web. It’s essentially coming back to my roots. I co-founded the Albuquerque WordPress meetup in 2010. I co-organized the first WordCamp Albuquerque. The WordPress open source community is literally how I found Automattic in the first place.

I’m aware that not everyone works somewhere that says, “Hey! after more than a decade of building something in one area, what else might you be great at?” That’s the kind of company Automattic is, and I don’t take it for granted for even a second.

I’m stepping into this new role with a lot of humility. The WordPress community has been through a lot. Primarily I’ll be focusing on operations and events and bridging any gaps between Automattic and the community. People will see me at WordCamps and local meetups for now and around the Make Slack. Right now, the team I’m working with is finding and implementing ways for students in the education programs to get integrated into the community as contributors. This is pretty exciting as we are working on real tangible ways of building and future-proofing the community. I care about this community deeply and I want to help make things work well for the people in it and help make sure it’s around for the long haul.