Senior Software Engineer Full-time

Senior Software Engineer

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a product software engineer to join our Structured Data team, reporting to product engineering management. As a product software engineer, you will be responsible for software engineering for our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a mostly-remote environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write open source code for collaborative experiences supporting over a billion users, and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.

You are responsible for:

Improving the Wikipedia product experience
Iterating on new products and features through collaboration with designers and product managers
Writing multilingual and accessible JavaScript, CSS, and PHP
Creating and maintaining internet APIs with server scripting languages
Instrumenting components to monitor feature and quality characteristics
Leveraging caching and persistence technologies

Skills and Experience:

5+ years related professional experience in functional programming or OOP
Experience building user-friendly features and software components with good performance
Focused software engineering: you enjoy writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and thoughtfully balancing architectural tradeoffs

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

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

Fluency in one or more regional languages in Africa, Asia, or Latin America
Experience developing for markets in Africa, Asia, or Latin America
Practical skills with Vue.js or React
Project work in data science, machine learning, AI (especially on natural language)
A history of open source contribution
Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, management information systems, or STEM field (or equivalent certification)
Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress). We grow and care for MediaWiki and Wikimedia specific services. MediaWiki is an open source, PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript web application that powers Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation websites. It has been incrementally developed for over 15 years to become a richly featured wiki engine and the basis for hundreds of extensions and skins, and has a vibrant volunteer community. Our services utilize a number of technologies.

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.

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.