Senior Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation

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.

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:

• 4+ 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
• 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.