Linux Infrastructure · High-Traffic WordPress · Available for Contracts

Linux Infrastructure Engineer.

I manage production Linux servers for a living — specializing in high-traffic WordPress stacks. Incident response, performance diagnosis, and database tuning. Available 10–25 hours/week for remote contracts.

4+Years in Production Linux Infra

10–25 hrsAvailable per Week

AsyncRemote-First

About

I’ve spent years going deeper into the infrastructure that keeps WordPress running at scale.

I manage Linux server infrastructure for a living. My day job is at Rocket.net, where I keep a fleet of production servers running — diagnosing high CPU incidents, resolving database performance issues, managing PHP environments across PHP 7.4 through 8.4, and handling whatever breaks in a live hosting environment. I’ve been doing this across managed hosting, VPS, and bare-metal environments for 4+ years.

In 2023, I became a WordPress Core contributor — reviewing patches, testing release candidates, and submitting fixes across versions 6.3 through 6.9. That work led to becoming the Hosting Team Representative for WordPress.org, where I advocate for hosting best practices and bridge infrastructure concerns with Core development. This contribution work is sponsored by Rocket.net and hosting.com.

Outside of engineering, I organize events, speak at meetups, and contribute across the Docs, Training, Test, and Translation teams — recognized in 2024 as a Yoast Care Fund recipient for community contributions. I believe the community is what makes WordPress genuinely worth investing in.

I work independently, communicate clearly, and take ownership of problems. If your team runs its own servers and needs someone reliable to handle infrastructure — I’m available part-time.

Quick Facts

Current RoleLinux Infrastructure @ Rocket.net

LocationDhaka, Bangladesh

Availability10–25 hrs/week · Remote contract

Core ContributorWordPress 6.3 – 6.9 (2023–Present)

WordPress.org TeamsHosting, Core, Docs, Training, Test, Translation

EducationBSc CSE — Independent University, Bangladesh

Certifications

Yoast — Care Fund Recipient
Cisco — CCNA Routing & Switching: Introduction to Networks
Cisco — CCNA Routing & Switching: Routing & Switching Essentials
Linux Foundation — Introduction to GitOps

zunaid321@gmail.com

Experience

Where I’ve worked and what I’ve built.

Full-timeSep 2022 — Present

WordPress Engineer

@ Rocket.net

Support and optimize a globally distributed managed WordPress hosting platform powering thousands of production websites.
Investigate and resolve complex infrastructure and application-level issues across the Linux, PHP, MySQL, Redis, and web server stack (Nginx/Apache), ensuring high availability and performance under heavy traffic.
Perform large-scale website migrations between hosting providers, managing secure SSH transfers, database synchronization, DNS transitions, and production validation with minimal downtime.
Lead deep debugging efforts for performance bottlenecks, including PHP memory leaks, excessive worker processes, slow database queries, and caching misconfigurations.
Optimize WordPress performance through advanced caching strategies, Redis object caching, and infrastructure-level tuning to improve response times and scalability.
Develop internal automation scripts and tooling to streamline operational workflows such as site provisioning, diagnostics, migrations, and infrastructure troubleshooting.
Collaborate with developers and agencies to diagnose complex WordPress issues, plugin conflicts, and scalability challenges in high-traffic environments.

Open Source2023 — Present

WordPress Core Contributor

@ WordPress.org

Active contributor to WordPress Core across versions 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, and 6.9 — submitting patches, reviewing tickets, and testing release candidates.
Prepare Dev Chat Summaries for weekly Core team meetings, improving communication across the contributor community.
Focus areas include performance improvements, caching infrastructure, and developer-facing APIs.

Volunteer Leadership2025 — Present

Hosting Team Representative

@ WordPress.org

Serve as the official Hosting Team Representative for WordPress.org, bridging the gap between hosting providers and Core development.
Coordinate hosting-related discussions, compatibility testing, and documentation efforts for major WordPress releases.
Represent hosting industry best practices and advocate for performance standards within the broader WordPress ecosystem.

Community2024 — Present

WordCamp Organizer, Volunteer & Community Contributor

@ WordPress Community

Organizer for WordCamp Asia 2025 — coordinating speakers, sessions, and community outreach for one of the largest regional WordPress conferences.
Volunteer at WordCamp Asia 2024. Attended 9 WordCamps across Asia, Europe, North America, and South Asia (2024–2025).
Contributor Day Table Lead at 4 WordCamps: WordCamp US 2025 (Hosting), WordCamp Asia 2025 (Hosting), WordCamp Sylhet 2024 (Test), WordCamp Malaysia 2024 (Test). Also contributed at WordCamp Europe 2025.

Full-timeOct 2021 — Sep 2022

Senior Web Hosting Specialist

@ Hostinger International

Progressed from Junior to Senior specialist within a year, supporting 30–50 customers daily via live chat and ticketing systems.
Led and managed team members during shifts, providing subject expertise and procedural guidance for complex hosting issues.
Collaborated with product and QA teams to surface customer feedback and drive product improvements.

Full-timeAug 2020 — Oct 2021

Full Stack Developer

@ Aveneur Solutions

Built client-facing web applications using React, .NET Core, and Django, establishing a strong full-stack foundation.
Developed and maintained WordPress sites, handling custom theme work and bug resolution.
Built cross-platform mobile apps using Flutter for Android and iOS, using GitHub for CI/CD workflows.

Expertise

What I do best.

Infrastructure & Hosting

Enterprise-grade WordPress hosting architecture and server management.

Redis & Object Cache ProUbuntu / Linux ServerWireGuard VPNNginx & ApacheDockerSSL / TLSDNS ManagementCDN Configuration

Performance Engineering

Diagnosing and eliminating bottlenecks at every layer of the stack.

Core Web VitalsPHP Memory ProfilingObject CachingDatabase OptimizationQuery MonitoringAsset OptimizationLazy LoadingCritical CSS

Automation & Tooling

Building systems that eliminate repetitive work and reduce human error.

Bash ScriptingCron AutomationRocket.net APIMigration SystemsWP-CLIREST API WorkflowsAI Workflow ToolingGoogle Drive API

Server Operations

Keeping production Linux environments stable, secure, and recoverable.

Incident ResponseServer Hardeningfail2ban / UFWSSH HardeningBackup SystemsMonitoring SetupLog AnalysisUptime Management

Community Leadership

Giving back to the ecosystem that powers 43% of the web.

Core ContributorHosting Team RepDocs & Training TeamsWordCamp OrganizingMeetup SpeakingMentorshipOpen Source AdvocacyTechnical Writing

Services

What you can hire me for. Concrete engagements, scoped clearly.

Part-time, remote, async-friendly. 10–25 hours/week. The most common engagements are below — but if your situation doesn’t fit one cleanly, email me and we’ll figure it out.

Incident Response Retainer

Retainer

On-call coverage for production Linux servers. When something breaks at 2pm on a Tuesday — high CPU, 502s, database lockups, mystery latency — I take the page, triage it, and ship the fix.

Included

Defined response window during your business hours
Live triage on Slack, Discord, or email — your tooling, not mine
Root-cause writeup after every incident
Quarterly resilience review of recurring incident patterns

Performance & Database Tuning

Project

Slow site, slow queries, slow checkout. I diagnose the bottleneck across the whole stack — Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, Redis, kernel — and ship targeted fixes with before/after numbers.

Included

End-to-end performance audit (LCP, INP, query times, worker saturation)
Slow query log analysis and index recommendations
PHP-FPM and Nginx tuning for the actual traffic shape
Object cache and Redis configuration review

Server Hardening Audit

Project

I take a freshly provisioned (or long-neglected) Linux server and bring it to a production-ready security baseline. Same playbook used across hundreds of WordPress hosts.

Included

SSH hardening (key-only auth, custom port, root login disabled)
UFW firewall rules + fail2ban with sensible defaults
Unattended security upgrades and reboot policy
Backup verification and recovery dry-run
Documented runbook handed to your team

Ongoing Server Maintenance

Monthly

For teams running their own servers but without a dedicated sysadmin. I keep the lights on — patches, backups, monitoring, capacity headroom — so your engineers can ship product instead of babysitting OS upgrades.

Included

Monthly patching window (security + dependency)
Backup integrity checks and restore tests
Uptime and resource monitoring with alerting
Pre-emptive scaling recommendations
Direct line to me when things look weird

Rates & how to start

Hourly rates depend on scope and urgency — incident retainers start higher than steady ongoing maintenance. Email me with what you’re running, what’s breaking, and your rough hours/week, and I’ll send a clear quote within 24 hours.

Testimonials

What people say about working with me.

64 reviews from customers and colleagues across Rocket.net, Hostinger, and LinkedIn.

“We input a request for a migration, and within a minute, I had a reply to say they were working on it. Within 10 minutes it had been added to our account with additional plugins installed to improve the backend speed. Zunaid was really helpful and friendly too. I would highly recommend.”

“Great support, hyperfast migration of our WordPress website. Thanks Zunaid!”

“Always great experience over countless hosting. Support is tier 1 and they go out of their scope to help you and speeds are tier 1, you won't be disappointed. Had a hosting issue resolved by Zunaid today and fixed it within minutes!”

“I am extremely overwhelmed by the support given by Zunaid from the Hostinger support team in solving my SSL certificate problem in significantly less time. Thanks!”

“Zunaid was very quick to respond to my email regarding one of my websites being down following a server transfer today. Zunaid pointed me to the problem which was due to my Cloudflare proxy DNS server A records not being updated with the new server address.”

WordPress Support Engineer | Core Contributor

“It is with great pleasure that I recommend Zunaid for any professional endeavor. Throughout our time working together, Zunaid consistently displayed exceptional talent and dedication in his role. His meticulous attention to detail and analytical mindset were instrumental in solving complex problems and driving successful projects. Zunaid's ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with team members and stakeholders was truly commendable, fostering a positive and productive work environment.”

Rocket.net on Trustpilot·Hostinger on Trustpilot·Recommendations on LinkedIn

Writing

Thoughts on Linux, infrastructure, and open source.

InfrastructureFeatured

Apr 2026·7 min read

Triaging an Nginx 502 Bad Gateway on a busy WordPress server

A Nginx → PHP-FPM stack started returning 502s under load with no error in the application logs. Here's the exact triage path I used to find the cause — checking PHP-FPM workers, the socket, the error log, and the one tuning change that fixed it for good.

Infrastructure6 min read

How I diagnosed a MariaDB query eating 100% CPU on a production server

A shared hosting server on our fleet started spiking to 100% CPU with no obvious cause. Here's the exact process I used to find it — from top and mysqladmin processlist to slow query log analysis and the fix that brought load back to normal.

Infrastructure7 min read

Why your WooCommerce site dies at midnight every day

A WooCommerce store on shared hosting kept going down at the same time every night. No traffic spike, no deploy, no obvious cause. The culprit was Action Scheduler, and the fix had nothing to do with WooCommerce itself.

Infrastructure6 min read

Why your Linux server has 90% swap usage with plenty of free RAM

A monitoring dashboard lit up red because swap usage was at 92% on a server with 8 GB of free RAM. Counterintuitive but completely fine — and explaining why is a useful exercise in how Linux memory actually works.

Infrastructure8 min read

When wp_wc_product_attributes_lookup eats your database

A WooCommerce store with 40,000 SKUs started showing slow queries against a table most people don't think about. Here's why WooCommerce regenerates it, why large catalogs make it brutal, and how to keep it from melting your database.

Infrastructure6 min read

When MySQL runs out of connections because everything is sleeping

A MariaDB instance hit max_connections during normal traffic. The processlist was full of Sleep entries — connections doing nothing, but holding slots. The fix wasn't raising max_connections.

Infrastructure6 min read

When Cloudflare's bot protection breaks your own API

A WordPress REST API that worked fine in browsers started returning 403s when called from a partner's backend. The application logs were clean. The Cloudflare dashboard was the real story — and the fix needed care.

Infrastructure5 min read

How to actually block a malicious /24 (instead of playing whack-a-mole)

Repeated attacks were coming from rotating IPs in the same subnet. Blocking them one at a time was pointless. The fix was understanding CIDR ranges and where to do the blocking.

Infrastructure5 min read

Why wget https://1.2.3.4 fails with an SSL error (and what SNI has to do with it)

A common debugging mistake: trying to test an HTTPS server by hitting its IP address directly with wget or curl. It always fails certificate validation, and the reason is one of the more interesting corners of how SSL/TLS actually works.

Infrastructure5 min read

Why your PHP version 'didn't change' (and how CLI and FPM lie to each other)

You upgraded PHP. php -v confirms the new version. The website still loads with the old one. The most common cause isn't a caching issue — it's that PHP CLI and PHP-FPM are two completely separate things.

Infrastructure5 min read

robots.txt is not a security tool, and it never was

A surprising number of people still believe robots.txt blocks malicious bots from crawling sensitive paths. It doesn't. It never has. Here's what robots.txt actually does, and where to put real blocks instead.

Community5 min read

Receiving the Yoast Care Fund — What It Meant to My WordPress Journey

In July 2024 I found out I'd been nominated for the Yoast Care Fund. Here's the honest story behind it — the contribution work that led there, the community that pushed me forward, and what it actually felt like.

Community6 min read

What Rocket.net's Five for the Future Sponsorship Actually Looks Like

Rocket.net sponsors 23 hours of my week toward WordPress.org contribution. This is what that commitment looks like in practice — Core patches, Hosting team meetings, testing, and why I believe in it.

Community7 min read

Organizing WordCamp Asia 2025: What Nobody Tells You

I helped organize WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila. The spreadsheets, the late-night calls, the moments where it almost didn't come together — and why I'd do it again without hesitation.

Community5 min read

How I Became WordPress.org's Hosting Team Representative

In early 2025 I was named one of the WordPress.org Hosting Team Reps. This is what that role actually involves, how I got there, and what bridging hosting providers with Core development means day-to-day.

Community6 min read

Leading Contributor Day Tables at 4 WordCamps: What I Learned

I've led Hosting and Test tables at WordCamp US, Asia, Sylhet, and Malaysia. The energy is incredible every time — but there's also a craft to helping first-time contributors get their first patch in.

Community8 min read

Nine WordCamps in Two Years: An Honest Recap

From Sylhet to San Diego to Vienna — I attended 9 WordCamps across Asia, Europe, and North America in 2024 and 2025. What I actually got from it, and what I'd tell anyone considering their first one.

Community & Open Source

Giving back to the ecosystem that powers the web.

6.3+Contributing since

6WordPress.org Teams

2025WordCamp Asia Organizer

43%Of the web runs WordPress

Core

WordPress Core Contributor

Since 6.3

Contributing patches, testing release candidates, and reviewing tickets since WordPress 6.3. Preparing Dev Chat Summaries for weekly Core meetings.

Leadership

Hosting Team Representative

Rep Since 2025

Official representative of the WordPress Hosting Team — advocating for hosting best practices, coordinating compatibility testing, and bridging infrastructure concerns with Core development.

Docs

Docs, Training, Test & Translation

4 Teams

Contributing across four WordPress.org teams — documentation, training materials, release testing, and Bangla translation — making WordPress more accessible worldwide.

Events

WordCamp Organizer & Table Lead

9 WordCamps

Organizer for WordCamp Asia 2025. Contributor Day Table Lead at 4 WordCamps (Hosting & Test tables). Volunteer at WordCamp Asia 2024. Attended 9 WordCamps across Asia, Europe, North America, and South Asia.

Speaker & Meetup Organizer

Regularly speaking at WordPress meetups and local developer events — sharing knowledge on hosting architecture, performance optimization, and the open-source contribution journey.

Contact

Available for part-time contracts.

I’m available for part-time Linux server administration and infrastructure contracts — remote, async-friendly, 10–25 hours/week. Server setup, performance diagnosis, incident response, ongoing maintenance.

zunaid321@gmail.com

Response time: usually within 24 hours.