Senior Software Engineer

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for product software engineers to join our 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 this:

  • 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
  • A history of open source contributions
  • 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 layers utilize a number of technologies.

The following teams are actively seeking candidates:

Web Team

On the Web Team, we work to improve the user experience for the readers of Wikimedia sites. These readers are responsible for 25 Billion monthly page views, from up to 2 Billion unique devices. 

We’re currently working to bring dark mode and font size customization to our users, as well as enhancements to the accessibility of our pages. We are exploring a future focused on growing our platform capabilities, and working with our communities to improve the flexibility and consistency of the user experience across the desktop and mobile web. As a full stack engineer with a frontend focus, you will be responsible for making changes to both our javascript-based frontend and our PHP-based backend code, with an emphasis on the frontend user experience and our skins-based templating system.  You should be comfortable with benchmarking, running synthetic tests and have an understanding of XSS and how to prevent them.

Growth Team

On the Growth team, our mission is to support new account holders by designing and building engaging, intuitive, and inclusive products that make it easier to join the Wikimedia movement. We envision a thriving Wikimedia community where the barrier to entry for contributing to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is as low as possible, thus allowing more people to successfully become active editors, and advance into roles that require more experience, leading to a sustainable and diverse knowledge commons. So far, our main projects have focused on machine-learning driven task recommendations and volunteer mentorship. As a full stack engineer with experience in backend programming roles and some understanding of fundamental frontend concepts as well, you will be responsible for building out various APIs that power the user facing components for our product user experiences.

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 in more than 50 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$105,309 to US$163,646 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. 

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

U.S. Benefits & Perks
Wikimedia Foundation
Applicant Privacy Policy
News from across the Wikimedia movement
Blog
Wikimedia 2030
Our Commitment to Equity
This is Wikimedia Foundation 
Facts Matter
Our Projects
Our Tech Stack

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