Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team
About the role
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join our team, reporting to engineering management. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for engineering software that supports our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a fully-remote environment (with occasional travel for team, department, or organization events).
Responsibilities
- Designing and delivering improvements to Wikipedia's wikitext processing infrastructure, balancing user experience, performance, backwards compatibility, and maintainability
- Iterating on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, client teams, and community members
- Writing PHP and JavaScript which supports hundreds of world languages
- Creating and maintaining internet APIs with server scripting languages
- Instrumenting components to monitor feature and quality characteristics
- Leveraging caching and persistence technologies
Requirements
- 5+ years of related professional experience in software engineering
- Experience with one or more of: parser generators, interpreters, language runtimes, compilers, or bringing a language feature through a product cycle
- Demonstrated ability to own complex technical projects from problem definition through implementation and delivery, including making and communicating architectural decisions and navigating ambiguity
- Strong engineering practices: you enjoy writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and balancing architectural tradeoffs
- Able to work effectively across team and organizational boundaries, identify and resolve technical dependencies, and bring projects to completion with limited direction
- Experience mentoring other engineers and raising the technical quality of a team, through code reviews, design discussions, documentation, or direct mentorship
Qualifications
- 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
- A self-motivated individual with an ability to navigate through ambiguity and bring a project to completion with limited direction
Preferred
- Familiarity with the HTML5 spec and DOM manipulation
- Expertise in Node.js and related technologies
- Familiarity with Wikipedia/wikitext/markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress)
- A history of open source contribution
- A Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, software engineering, or other STEM field (or equivalent certification)
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.
What We Offer
- The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries
- We are an equal opportunity employer and value having a diverse workforce and continuously strive to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace
- We offer competitive salaries, with the anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States being 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