Senior Software Engineer
Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our team, reporting to Product Manager. As the Senior Software Engineer, you will be a core member of the Wikimedia Enterprise engineering team and will contribute heavily to some of the high impact challenges behind innovating, building, and maintaining Wikipedia’s data feeds for high volume reusers. You will also be a leader in the long term strategy of the project, working with tech leadership to propose infrastructure that meets goals of our movement and the needs of our customers. In this role, you will become an expert on AWS and the tradeoffs of different infrastructure setups for short and long term sustainability of large scale data products. You will work directly with tech and product leadership to craft strategy, and directly with the engineering team to build better software that will meet requirements from our customers.
We are a distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment, and embrace new technologies. We act sort of like a startup within the Wikimedia Foundation: we build quickly, deploy often, and our work has a very high impact on the global knowledge ecosystem.
If you are up to the challenge of working on something fast paced, of creating services that will revolutionize the systems distributing our knowledge for billions of people across the world, and enjoy the idea of working with a globally distributed team, you might be just the person we need.
Read more about the project in WIRED and Insider.
You are responsible for:
- Bringing your creativity to improve our current infrastructure
- Being a key part of planning our future technical roadmap
- Maintaining and improving the reliability of highly used commercial data feeds
- Supporting new code/feature deployments
- Troubleshooting, debugging and following-up on emerging issues in our application stack and its surroundings
- Being the interface between the Wikimedia Foundation’s SRE team and Wikimedia Enterprise
- Assisting in the architectural design of new services and making them operate at scale
- Incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia Enterprise’s production infrastructure
- Sharing our values and work in accordance with them
Skills and Experience:
- 3+ years experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team
- Being comfortable working in a semi-ambiguous environment, similar to that of a startup
- Experience in supporting complex web applications running on Amazon Web Services or other comparable cloud platforms
- Experience working with Kafka or similar distributed event processing systems
- Experience working with Nodejs and Go applications
- Comfortable with configuration management and orchestration tools (ECS, Kubernetes), and modern observability infrastructure (monitoring, metrics and logging)
- Aptitude for automation and streamlining of tasks
- Comfortable with shell and scripting languages used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (e.g. Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, etc.)
- Good understanding of Linux/Unix fundamentals and debugging skills
- Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent in related work experience
Qualities that are important to us:
- Track record of open source contributions is highly appreciated
- Experience with non-cloud hosted infrastructure
- Startup experience is a plus
- Remote work experience with a highly distributed team
Additionally, we’d love it if you have:
- Fluency in languages other than English
The Wikimedia Foundation is...
...the nonprofit organization that hosts and operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge, free of interference. We host the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive financial support from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.
As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.
If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or (415) 839-6885.
U.S. Benefits &Perks*
- Fully paid medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and their eligible families (yes, fully paid premiums!)
- The Wellness Program provides reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, baby sitting, continuing education and much more
- The 401(k) retirement plan offers matched contributions at 4% of annual salary
- Flexible and generous time off - vacation, sick and volunteer days, plus 22 paid holidays - including the last week of the year.
- Family friendly! 100% paid new parent leave for seven weeks plus an additional five weeks for pregnancy, flexible options to phase back in after leave, fully equipped lactation room.
- For those emergency moments - long and short term disability, life insurance (2x salary) and an employee assistance program
- Pre-tax savings plans for health care, child care, elder care, public transportation and parking expenses
- Telecommuting and flexible work schedules available
- Appropriate fuel for thinking and coding (aka, a pantry full of treats) and monthly massages to help staff relax
- Great colleagues - diverse staff and contractors speaking dozens of languages from around the world, fantastic intellectual discourse, mission-driven and intensely passionate people
*Please note that for remote roles located outside of the U.S., we defer to our PEO to ensure alignment with local labor laws.
More information
Wikimedia Foundation
Blog
Wikimedia 2030
Wikimedia Medium Term Plan
Our Commitment to Equity
This is Wikimedia Foundation
Facts Matter
Our Projects
Our Tech Stack