Wikimedia Foundation Careers

• The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Editing team, reporting to product engineering management. As a product engineer, you will be responsible for building out the user-facing components for our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a distributed environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write open source code for collaborative experiences supporting a worldwide top-ten website (over a half a billion pages accessed per day), and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.
• On the Editing Team, we support new and experienced volunteers working in 300+ languages with the tools they need to keep Wikipedia accurate and up to date. The team's main area of focus is the flagship VisualEditor, our industry-leading rich-text editor. We're also working on DiscussionTools for on-wiki communication, and our new project, Edit Check, an edit suggestion system to support newcomers.

You are responsible for:

• Improving Wikipedia's contribution experience by building new functionality and fixing bugs
• Collaborating with product managers, designers, and other teams on shared projects
• Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant code using Javascript and PHP
• Building on top of the rich and complex MediaWiki API ecosystem
• Working with other engineers across teams to proactively reduce technical debt
• Instrumenting components to monitor user behavior and performance characteristics

Essentials:
Strong aptitude in algorithms and data structures is essential!

• Proven ability to collaborate in a team
• Experience in writing well-documented and maintainable code

Desirables:

• 5+ years related professional or open-source software engineering experience
• Experience in Javascript, PHP or any similar language e.g. Python
• Aptitude for writing unit and integration tests
• Aptitude for addressing feedback from security review and code review
• Aptitude for balancing architectural trade-offs

Qualities that are important to us:

• A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access
• An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels
• Interest in mentoring, teaching and sharing technical knowledge

Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:

• Experience building a rich-text editor
• Experience working with internationally distributed teams or organizations
• A history of open-source contribution
• A history of editing on Wikimedia projects
• Experience working with large, legacy codebases
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or STEM field or equivalent experience

You'll work remotely with a full-time distributed team, with members spread between Europe and North America, and need to overlap (UTC-5 to UTC+1) working hours. Some examples of the type of work you'll be doing include:

• Expanding the capabilities of our toolforge platform
• Expanding and refining our storage offerings, backed by Ceph and NFS
• Scaling our team via automation
• Providing a curated Jupyter notebook environment for data analysis and queries of Wikimedia data
• Upgrading, customizing, and adding new services like terraform support, and Database as a service to Openstack
• Developing new webservices for our technical community, like Quarry and PAWS
• And the backlog has even more details!

You are responsible for:

• Helping to create a repeatable Openstack cloud deployment
• Implementing a network topology using Open vSwitch, providing per tenant networking, load balancing, and IPv6
• Performing day-to-day operational tasks on Wikimedia's Cloud Services infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting). Develop and support automation tools and processes in support of these tasks.
• Participating in on-call rotation and support in a 24x7 environment

Skills and Experience:

• Comfortable working and thriving within a Linux ecosystem
• Understand networking in the physical domain of switches and servers
• Software development skills in at least one of the following languages: Python, Go, Javascript, and/or Ruby
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or related field or equivalent in related work experience.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Share our values, appreciate our code of conduct, support our team norms, and work in accordance with all three
• Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
• Support of our users (volunteer and staff developers) using our service offerings
• Passionate about the value of learning and growing together

Additionally, we'd love it if you have:

• Utilized configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, and SaltStack
• Used Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, or similar container orchestration platforms
• Operated an elastic computing environment such as OpenStack or Cloudstack
• Operated a multi-tenant capable software defined network (SDN)
• Experience in serverless computing environments
• Linux systems troubleshooting and debugging skills
• Interest in open source software projects and communities

Director of Engineering, Developer Experience

• The Director of Engineering, Developer Experience is accountable for the Developer Experience Group in the Wikimedia Foundation and is an active participant in the strategic decision making for the Product and Technology department and across the Wikimedia movement. The Developer Experience Group includes Release Engineering, Cloud Services, Technical Documentation, and Quality & Test Engineering teams. This role shares responsibility with the Director of Product for Developer Experience to develop and execute a holistic strategy for Developer Experience in collaboration with other engineering teams, product management, and the volunteer technical contributor community. The teams in this group develop and deliver software, services, and processes that build and sustain our engineering culture and foster improved collaboration. This role is a people management role responsible for completion of technical objectives and a key partner to their Director of Product counterpart.

You are responsible for:

• Leading a group of teams working to make it easier to build, maintain, and deploy reliable software that powers a top 15 internet destination.
• Continuous improvement of the tools, systems, and services that support staff, affiliate, and volunteer software development practices.
• Living and demonstrating our values by fostering a working environment and team relationships that are aligned in our mission, welcoming to everyone who shares our vision and values, curious and open to new ideas, focused on delivering great work, and constantly improving.
• Coaching, developing, and empowering engineering managers and highly senior individual contributors to enable their success in solving problems, delivering on team objectives, and coaching and developing their team members.
• Engineering delivery of the teams in the Developer Experience Group.
• Collaborating with the Director of Product for Developer Experience on roadmaps and technical strategy.
• Participating with other senior managers & directors across the department to establish strategic plans, align towards common objectives, and solve complex problems.
• Participating in organizational development of methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for projects, programs, and people to ensure the greatest impact for the Foundation.
• Planning, staffing, budgeting, and managing expense priorities within the cost center for Developer Experience.

Skills and Experience:

• Leading teams that manage software engineering lifecycle processes and services in an organization with 100+ software engineers
• Leading or managing a developer experience, developer productivity, or developer relations function
• Experience managing organizational interaction with a community of technical contributors
• Management or contribution to an open source software project
• Significant progressive engineering management experience
• Experience building and leading diverse, multi-national and remote-first teams
• Proven success at all stages of the engineering process and product lifecycle, leading to significant, measurable impact
• Experience working with internal and external software engineering stakeholders to build processes and tooling to support the software development lifecycle

Essential Functions of Role:

Content

• Provide legal advice and counsel regarding content on the Wikimedia projects, with appropriate attention to both community governance policies and our Applicable Law policy.
• Advise the Foundation on current and forthcoming regulations related to online content.Provide related product counseling advice regarding technical features of the Wikimedia platform.
• Help protect and defend content on the Wikimedia projects, and the community governance model.
• Monitor legal developments that may impact the accessibility of Wikimedia content, highlight potential risks, and work with the litigation and access to knowledge teams to plan responses where necessary
• Support the evolution of the Wikimedia Foundation’s bi-annual Transparency Report.
• Recommend and implement changes to report content and metrics tracked, drawing on applicable regulations, industry standards, and feedback from the Wikimedia communities.

Advocacy

• Work with lawyers and public policy professionals to refresh our strategy and process for filing amicus briefs and other legal interventions in support of the Wikimedia mission, and execute such.
• Identify potential actions, and coordinate with legal and advocacy leadership to select opportunities.
• Work with Wikimedia legal and advocacy subject matter experts, as well as local counsel, to draft and file actions.
• Partner with the Communications and Global Advocacy teams to keep the Wikimedia communities informed about our strategic litigation.
• Coordinate Foundation advocacy strategy with Wikimedia movement organizations and other allies in the free knowledge space.
• Liaise with the Litigation team in order to help maintain a holistic view of both defensive and strategic litigation.

Additional Duties

• Advise the Foundation on other domestic and international legal and policy questions, which may include privacy, contract, copyright, trademark, or defensive litigation matters.

Other duties as assigned.

Skills and Experience:

• JD from an accredited law school and current membership in good standing with at least one US state bar.
• Experience advising online platforms or media organizations regarding online content.
• Experience leading cross-functional efforts, especially with product or technical teams, to implement legal advice.
• Experience supporting public policy professionals in executing an advocacy strategy, especially on matters relating to online environments, such as content, copyright, platform responsibility, privacy, etc.
• Experience working across borders, on matters in non-U.S. jurisdictions, or for clients outside the U.S., particularly matters relating to European law.
• Ability to identify and implement practical solutions to abstract or complex problems.
• Ability to excel in a fast-paced, multitasking environment that demands high-quality work.
• Ability to dedicate to projects, adhere to deadlines, and complete work independently.
• Excellent writing and presentation skills.

Please note, this role may call for travel, including internationally, and for travel or work on weekends if and when needed, due to conferences, legal needs, etc. This is not a requirement, and alternate arrangements may be made where appropriate.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Appreciation for and alignment with Wikimedia’s mission.
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills and ability to work well on a team.
• A desire to learn, stretch, and grow.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• 6+ years practicing law.
• Experience working in-house.
• Prior experience working with or participating in large volunteer communities.
• Experience working on media law-related matters.
• Experience working as product counsel for a technology company.
• Experience with software programming, engineering, or design.
• Ability to speak additional languages besides English.
• Prior work, internship, or volunteer experience in the nonprofit sector.

• As an engineer in the SRE team, you will be involved in defining and running the infrastructure and services that form the base of Wikimedia Foundation projects. This will include frequent work with other SRE members to improve our scalability, high availability, recoverability, monitoring, and logging infrastructure. You will participate in incident response and the on-call rotation. You will also frequently interact with people not in SRE, like Security, Release, and Software Engineers, who all strive to improve MediaWiki and related software.

We use more technologies than we can list here and are interested in your experience, even if it doesn’t exactly match the keywords listed here.

Responsibilities:

• Implementation and maintenance of Internet-facing infrastructure and services
• Use of configuration management and deployment tools
• Monitoring of systems and services, optimization of performance, and resource utilization
• Typical operating system-level tasks such as logging and backup / restore
• Cookbook/runbook implementation for everyday maintenance actions
• Incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system outages or alerts
• Collaborating with a global and asynchronously communicating team (don’t worry if you have never worked remotely; we’ll help you get used to it)

Qualifications:

• 2+ years experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role
• Experience with operating highly available infrastructure
• Comfortable with shell and a programming language used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Ruby, etc.)
• Experience with package management for operating systems (Debian, etc.)
• Comfortable with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, TerraForm, etc.)
• Past exposure to automation and streamlining of tasks
• Communicative technical English

We would love it if you have:

• A history of contributing to Open Source projects
• Prior participation in the Wikimedia movement
• Hands-on experience with Observability related tools practices (tracing, logging, metrics, performance monitoring, SLOs, and alerting)

• We are strengthening the team and looking for a Director of SRE to lead our staff and ensure teams achieve our goals. Wikimedia Foundation’s Site Reliability Engineering team is responsible for ensuring our global top-10 web site and other public facing services are healthy, and developing its infrastructure, platform and services further in the enablement of Wikimedia Foundation’s mission. The SRE team comprises over 45 creative and talented staff members who are globally distributed, organized into seven teams each with their own scope and focus area.

Responsibilities:

• Your first priority: Lead multiple SRE teams in keeping Wikimedia’s sites and services (including Wikipedia) running responsively, reliably and securely, including protection against outages, data loss or breaches, and accommodation and implementation of Wikimedia’s Movement Strategy (including “Infrastructure for Open”).
• Your second priority: Partner with engineering teams at Wikimedia to set direction and build platforms enabling transformative changes to Wikimedia’s user experience while ensuring appropriate operational review and support along the way.
• Your foundation: An amazing Site Reliability Engineering team that’s taken us to more than half a billion users a month with passion, ingenuity, solid engineering practices and duct tape. Nurturing, growing, trusting and developing this team and its leaders is your path to success in this role.
• Your values: You care about free and open information, and are committed to finding solutions to engineering problems in line with our guiding principles. You share our values and work in accordance with them.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years experience in site reliability engineering, technical operations, or infrastructure engineering roles
• 4+ years experience managing infrastructure teams at high traffic websites or online services at scale
• Track record of managing, inspiring and mentoring multiple managers and engineers, and aligning them across the organization and in the community
• Experience in managing large-scale projects with technical deep-dives into code, networking and operating systems
• Experience developing and tracking department and project budgets
• Experience in globally distributed, multi-site high-traffic environments, preferably with both on-premise bare-metal and cloud based infrastructure
• Familiarity with open source development and community practices. Experience adopting/integrating open source solutions. Track record of upstream contributions (whether personal or through a team) is a huge plus
• Familiarity with engineering team practices and experience interfacing SRE with other design, product and engineering teams tasked with continuous delivery of functionality
• Familiarity with large website application architectures, including caching layers, storage scaling concepts, network infrastructure, monitoring systems, etc.
• Experience with highly geographically distributed teams and follow-the-sun operations is a major plus. Personal cross-cultural experience (having lived, or worked internationally) helps as well

Pluses:

• A track record of modeling and shaping best community, open source and development practices
• Experience in negotiation & RFPs for data center service contracts, equipment purchases, peering agreements, etc.

• As an engineer in the SRE team you will be involved in defining and running the infrastructure and services that form the base of Wikimedia Foundation projects. This will include frequent work with other members of the SRE team to improve our infrastructure in terms of scalability, high availability, recoverability, monitoring and logging. You will participate in incident response and be oncall. You will also be frequently interacting with people not in SRE, like Security, Release and Software Engineers, who all strive to maintain and make Mediawiki and related software better.

You are responsible for:

• Performing day-to-day operational/DevOps tasks on Wikimedia’s public facing infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting
• Implementing and utilizing configuration management and deployment tools (Puppet, Kubernetes)
• Leading continuous improvement, by automating the installation, configuration and maintenance of services on our platform
• Assisting in the architectural design of new services and making them operate at scale
• Assisting in or leading incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system outages and alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
• Share our values and work in accordance with them

Skills and Experience:

• 2+ years experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team
• Experience with operating highly available infrastructure
• Comfortable with shell and a programming language used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Ruby, etc.)
• Experience with package management for operating systems (Debian, etc)
• Comfortable with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, TerraForm etc.)
• Past exposure to automation and streamlining of tasks
• Communicative technical English

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• A history of contributing to Open Source projects
• Prior participation in the Wikimedia movement

You are responsible for:

• Design, implementation and maintenance of public facing infrastructure and services
• Use of configuration management and deployment tools
• Architectural design and operation at scale
• Monitoring of systems and services, optimization of performance and resource utilization
• Common operating system level tasks such as logging and backup / restore
• Cookbook / runbook implementation for common maintenance actions
• Incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts
• Automation and streamlining of tasks as well as identifying process gaps
• Collaborating with a global and asynchronously communicating team (don’t worry if you have never worked remotely, we’ll help you get used to it)
• Mentoring peers in your areas of technical and operational strength

Skills and Experience:

• Strong experience with automation and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible. Proficient in at least one programming language (Python,, Go, or similar).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies.
• Experience managing Cloud services and discovering cost savings (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Experience with monitoring, logging, and alerting tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK stack.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills, and ability to work effectively under pressure.
• Excellent communication skills with a strong emphasis on contributing to documenting processes and runbooks, and ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.
• Incident Management: Experience with incident management and on-call rotation practices, as well as tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
• SRE Best Practices: Understanding of SRE principles, such as Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and blameless postmortem.
• Familiarity with Wikimedia or other open source projects is a plus.
• If you are passionate about building and maintaining reliable, scalable, and highly available infrastructure on AWS, and thrive in a dynamic and collaborative environment, we encourage you to apply for this exciting opportunity to join our team at Wikimedia Enterprise

Qualities that are important to us:

• Experience with operating highly available infrastructure
• Experience with running applications and services at scale
• Proficient with shell and a programming language used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go,, etc.)
• Comfortable with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (, Ansible, TerraForm etc.)
• Communicative technical English

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience implementing containerization solutions (Docker, ECS, EC2, Kubernetes)
• Experience administering code collaboration software (Gitlab, Gerrit)
• Experience with managing and troubleshooting Event Streaming Services at scale (Kafka, Kinesis, etc)
• Experience with AWS tools is an advantage. Key services include EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, VPC, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM, and KMS
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Familiarity with IaC tools like Terraform, Helm or AWS CDK
• Security: Knowledge of security best practices in AWS, including the shared responsibility model, IAM policies, encryption, and data protection. Familiarity with AWS WAF, AWS Shield, or AWS Security Hub is bonus
• Experience with package management for operating systems (Debian, etc)
• We are avid supporters (and users) of open source software; history of contributing to Open Source projects is valued
• Prior participation in the Wikimedia movement

• In this role, you will work in a distributed remote environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach as we build fully open source software. You are a proactive and collaborative partner who can provide a structured approach to technical engagement processes with our global communities. You will collaborate with highly skilled individuals, who nurture the space for developers and Wikimedia community members volunteering their time and experiences towards improving software used by over a billion users, empowering them to do their best work.

Some travel opportunities (e.g., team/group offsites) are available, and we facilitate virtual attendance where needed.

You are responsible for:

• Drive projects and initiatives to completion across multiple cross-functional teams aligned with priorities determined by the user communities, organizational goals, and product and technology strategy
• Collaborate with partners within the Wikimedia movement for assessing technical and user needs that need attention
• Facilitate structured methodology to support continuous engagement with various stakeholders, technical follow through, and accountability of deliverables
• Isolate issues in complex systems and determine how to apply appropriate expertise for specific problems
• Fostering a supportive team environment with their peers, and ensuring diverse voices are heard
• Engage with volunteer developers from the movement towards meaningful opportunities for technical partnership
• Facilitate project prioritization, cross-team product conversations, and long-term planning
• Partnering with peers on cross-team delivery and organizational updates
• Promote a culture of continuous improvement and mentorship
• Participating in hiring considerate of diversity, equity, and inclusion

Skills and Experience:

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in creating and managing of user-facing engagement and support processes for product management and maintenance
• Ability to work across multiple teams and contexts
• Expertise in consumer-facing internet technology for large and diverse audiences
• Experience collaborating with product design throughout the product development lifecycle
• Strong knowledge of theoretical and practical aspects of product management including prioritization, stakeholder engagement, user experience, planning, time management and escalations
• Experience with using project management software
• Strong interpersonal communications skills
• Fluent in spoken and written English, and at least one other language

Qualities that are important to us:

• Ability to work with stakeholders both internally and externally
• Ability to build relationships and trusted partnerships with community members such as Wikipedia editors, volunteer developers, moderators, patrollers and readers
• Ability to anticipate risks and resolve conflicts, particularly in an environment where many voices are present and decisions are often made by consensus
• Detail-oriented with strong followthrough and an ability to keep the big picture in mind
• Passion for process improvement & knowledge sharing and a focus on actionable iteration
• A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access
• Clear communication in both synchronous and asynchronous channels

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience working in an international organization that has a distributed staff, including experience with videoconferencing software and good practices thereof
• Experience working with volunteer communities, professionally or otherwise
• Passionate about open source products, free knowledge, and Wikimedia’s mission
• Fluency in one or more regional languages of Africa or Asia