Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our team, reporting to the Sr. Engineering Manager. In this pivotal role, you will lead the development and execution of long-term engineering strategies in close collaboration with the product team. You will make significant contributions to the high-impact challenges involved in innovating, building, and maintaining Wikipedia’s data feeds for high-volume reusers. This position involves fostering cross-team collaboration to achieve business objectives, accelerating team progress through the design and implementation of essential tools and services, and guiding the team on best practices for software engineering and infrastructure reliability.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a cutting-edge, revenue-generating product designed to offer fast, comprehensive, reliable, and secure data ingestion for organizations looking to repurpose Wikimedia/Wikipedia content in third-party environments. The initiative aims to enhance the user experience for Wikimedia/Wikipedia readers beyond our native platforms, broaden the reach and discoverability of Wikimedia/Wikipedia content, and improve awareness and ease of attribution and verifiability of Wikimedia/Wikipedia content by its largest organizational reusers. You can delve deeper into this project through features in WIRED and Insider.

Our team operates like a startup within the Wikimedia Foundation: we build rapidly, deploy frequently, and our work profoundly impacts the global knowledge ecosystem. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment, are passionate about creating services that will revolutionize knowledge distribution for billions worldwide, and enjoy collaborating with a globally distributed team, you could be the ideal candidate.

Ideal candidates would be located in UTC+0 to UTC+2 time zones to collaborate effectively with the team.

Your Responsibilities

• Bring creativity to enhance our current infrastructure.
• Play a key role in planning our future technical roadmap.
• Maintain and improve the reliability of highly utilized commercial data feeds.
• Support new code and feature deployments.
• Troubleshoot, debug, and follow-up on emerging issues within our application stack and surrounding systems.
• Assist in the architectural design of new services and ensure their scalable operation.
• Handle incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia Enterprise’s production infrastructure.
• Share our values and work in accordance with them.

Skills And Experience

• Comfortable working in a semi-ambiguous, startup-like environment.
• Experience supporting complex web applications on Amazon Web Services or other comparable cloud platforms.
• Proficiency with Kafka or similar distributed event processing systems.
• Experience with Node.js 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 tasks.
• Comfortable with shell and scripting languages common in an SRE/Operations engineering context (e.g., Python, Go, Bash, Ruby).
• Strong understanding of Linux/Unix fundamentals and debugging skills.
• Excellent 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.

About The Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that 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 freely. We host Wikipedia and 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.

Key skills/competency

• Software Engineering
• Cloud Platforms (AWS)
• Distributed Systems (Kafka)
• Node.js
• Go Programming Language
• Kubernetes
• Linux/Unix
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Automation
• Observability