Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Enterprise

About the role

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our team, reporting to the Sr. Engineering Manager. This role plays a key part in designing, developing, and maintaining reliable, scalable, and highly available infrastructure for our API services. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will contribute to the high-impact challenges of innovating, building, and maintaining Wikipedia's data feeds for high-volume reusers. They will foster cross-department collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation SRE teams.

Responsibilities

• Define, track, and improve Service Level Objectives (SLOs), SLIs, and error budgets to ensure reliability targets are met
• Build and enhance observability systems (metrics, logs, and distributed tracing) to enable proactive detection and faster troubleshooting
• Drive reliability engineering practices, including capacity planning, load testing, and resilience validation (e.g., chaos testing)
• Improve developer experience (DevEx) by enabling self-service infrastructure and streamlining deployment workflows
• Partner with engineering team members to embed reliability best practices early in the development lifecycle
• Design, implement, and optimize CI/CD and GitOps workflows using tools such as GitLab (or similar) and ArgoCD (or similar), enabling automated, reliable deployments with support for progressive delivery strategies like canary and blue-green releases
• Implement secure-by-default infrastructure and enforce best practices (e.g., IAM, secrets management, encryption)
• Continuously optimize infrastructure cost and efficiency using FinOps principles while maintaining performance and availability
• Establish and track operational metrics such as MTTR, MTTD, and incident frequency to drive continuous improvement
• Reduce operational toil by identifying repetitive work and implementing automation-first solutions
• Collaborate with a global and asynchronously communicating team (don’t worry if you have never worked remotely, we’ll help you get used to it)
• Mentor peers in your areas of technical and operational strength

Requirements

You are responsible for defining, tracking, and improving Service Level Objectives (SLOs), SLIs, and error budgets to ensure reliability targets are met. You will build and enhance observability systems (metrics, logs, and distributed tracing) to enable proactive detection and faster troubleshooting. You will drive reliability engineering practices, including capacity planning, load testing, and resilience validation (e.g., chaos testing). You will improve developer experience (DevEx) by enabling self-service infrastructure and streamlining deployment workflows. You will partner with engineering team members to embed reliability best practices early in the development lifecycle. You will design, implement, and optimize CI/CD and GitOps workflows using tools such as GitLab (or similar) and ArgoCD (or similar), enabling automated, reliable deployments with support for progressive delivery strategies like canary and blue-green releases. You will implement secure-by-default infrastructure and enforce best practices (e.g., IAM, secrets management, encryption). You will continuously optimize infrastructure cost and efficiency using FinOps principles while maintaining performance and availability. You will establish and track operational metrics such as MTTR, MTTD, and incident frequency to drive continuous improvement. You will reduce operational toil by identifying repetitive work and implementing automation-first solutions. You will collaborate with a global and asynchronously communicating team (don’t worry if you have never worked remotely, we’ll help you get used to it). You will mentor peers in your areas of technical and operational strength.

Qualifications

• Automation & Configuration Management: Experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) and proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, or similar)
• Cloud Infrastructure: Experience designing, operating, and optimizing cloud-based systems across platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, including scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency
• CI/CD & Deployment Practices: Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows (e.g., GitLab or similar, ArgoCD), with familiarity in progressive delivery approaches such as canary and blue-green deployments
• Incident Management & Reliability Operations: Experience with incident response, on-call practices, and leading postmortems, with a focus on continuous improvement and operational excellence
• SRE Principles & Observability: Strong understanding of SRE best practices, including SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, along with experience in observability (metrics, logging, and distributed tracing e.g., Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
• Collaboration & Communication: Ability to work effectively in a distributed, cross-functional environment, with strong documentation and communication skills
• Familiarity with Wikimedia or other open source projects is a plus

Skills

• Automation & Configuration Management: Experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) and proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, or similar)
• Cloud Infrastructure: Experience designing, operating, and optimizing cloud-based systems across platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, including scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency
• CI/CD & Deployment Practices: Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows (e.g., GitLab or similar, ArgoCD), with familiarity in progressive delivery approaches such as canary and blue-green deployments
• Incident Management & Reliability Operations: Experience with incident response, on-call practices, and leading postmortems, with a focus on continuous improvement and operational excellence
• SRE Principles & Observability: Strong understanding of SRE best practices, including SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, along with experience in observability (metrics, logging, and distributed tracing e.g., Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
• Collaboration & Communication: Ability to work effectively in a distributed, cross-functional environment, with strong documentation and communication skills
• Familiarity with Wikimedia or other open source projects is a plus

Qualities

• Proven experience operating highly available, large-scale distributed systems, with a deep understanding of reliability, scalability, and failure modes
• Ownership mindset: Takes end-to-end responsibility for system reliability, proactively identifying and addressing risks before they impact users
• Bias for automation: Continuously seeks to reduce operational toil through automation and scalable solutions
• Continuous improvement mindset: Actively learns from incidents and drives improvements through blameless postmortems and iterative enhancements
• Customer and reliability focus: Prioritizes user experience by balancing availability, performance, and cost
• Adaptability and learning: Comfortable working in a fast-evolving environment and learning new tools and technologies as needed

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 $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based in 40+ countries. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$[ 116,633 ] to US$[ 181,243 ] 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: US States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia*, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico*, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming (*US Territory or Federal District) Countries: Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya*, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore*, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR) and must have current work authorization in their location. (*citizens/permanent residents only) 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.