Release Manager Full-time

Reports to

Director of Platform Engineering

Job Purpose

Lead and improve the continuous delivery of code to hundreds of millions of end users of the world’s largest non-profit web property, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia’s other projects.

Responsabilities

As Release Manager, you’ll enable Wikimedia’s diverse engineering teams (platform, features, mobile, internationalization, etc.) to move code from a developer’s work environment into production usage on one of the largest websites on the internet used by nearly a half-billion people every month quickly and responsibly.

Wikimedia Foundation has shifted its release practices from a slow multi-month cycle to a two-week cycle for core improvements and scheduled deployment windows for smaller changes. We’re doing this in the context of “everything” being open source and open to volunteer contribution.

We have the beginnings of a continuous integration infrastructure, and are evolving it further on the basis of an OpenStack VM cluster (Wikimedia Labs) used to host a clone of our production services for automated integration testing.

You’ll be responsible for

• Improving this process further, towards continuous delivery
  working with our development, QA and Labs teams to develop mature continuous integration practice;
• Supporting our amazing community of volunteers and third party devs in getting improvements into production
• Working with the open source community at large to support regular MediaWiki releases to third party users
• Shepherding open source community engagement related to the deployment infrastructure itself

We aspire to a process that’s radically transparent — we want our community to be informed about releases when they happen, and it’s part of your job to ensure that major deployments are accompanied by quality communications.

Qualifications

• You’ve done similar work (release/deployment/iteration management) before in a fast-paced environment (a start-up or mature engineering organization)
• You have a strong software engineering background and are familiar with open source build automation, continuous integration and configuration management tools (Ant, Maven, Jenkins, Chef/Puppet, etc.), software testing practices and frameworks, and standard web architecture components (the LAMP stack, caching technologies, distributed systems, etc.)
• You are able to learn quickly. Relevant hands-on experience and eagerness to learn and try new concepts is more important than having certificates. You’re comfortable automating tasks, writing glue code, extending existing open source components, and in general doing what’s needed to support and improve the release process
• We’re doing everything in the open, and we release all our code under open source terms. If you’ve made open source contributions yourself, we always love to see them
• You’re comfortable in a multilingual, cross-cultural context and are an excellent communicator
• Bachelor’s degree in related field or equivalent experience

Position location

Local San Francisco, CA candidates are preferred though remote candidates may be considered.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Our commitment: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 482 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most popular web property world-wide (comScore, January 2012). Available in 282 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 21 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501©(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants. The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of Wikipedia and its sister projects. It currently employs 150 staff members. Wikimedia works with local chapter organizations in 39 countries or regions to advance the mission of the Wikimedia movement.

• http://wikimediafoundation.org
• http://blog.wikimedia.org

How to apply

http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oZrQWfwW&c=qSa9VfwQ