Senior Software Engineer

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our team, reporting to the Sr. Engineering Manager. As the Senior Software Engineer, you will be responsible for developing and executing on the long-term engineering strategy in collaboration with the product team. You will contribute heavily to the high impact challenges behind innovating, building, and maintaining Wikipedia’s data feeds for high volume reusers. In this role, you will foster cross team collaboration where necessary to address business goals, keep the team moving quickly by designing and implementing necessary tools and services, and guide the team on best practices for software engineering and infrastructure reliability.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a new, revenue-generating product that provides fast, comprehensive, reliable, and secure data ingestion for organizations that wish to repurpose Wikimedia/Wikipedia content in third party environments. Wikimedia Enterprise aims to improve the user experience for Wikimedia/Wikipedia readers beyond our own websites; increase the reach and discoverability of Wikimedia/Wikipedia content; and improve awareness and ease of attribution and verifiability of Wikimedia/Wikipedia content by the organizations that reuse our content the most. You can learn more about the project in WIRED and Insider .

We are a distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment, and embrace  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.

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

• 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

• Monitoring system performance to make data-driven decisions 

• Writing and maintaining comprehensive documentation

• Staying up to date on emerging technologies and best practices to improve technology 

• Identify and implement opportunities to automate to increase efficiency

Skills and Experience:

• Being comfortable working in a semi-ambiguous environment, and collaborate across teams

• 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

• 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. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations 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.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries * . Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$109,047 to US$169,455 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location. 

*Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States of America and Uruguay.  Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR). 

We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements. 

All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.

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 +1 (415) 839-6885.

More information

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