Senior Software Engineer, Core Experiences (Contract)

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Full Stack Web Engineer contractor to join the App Growth team within Core Experiences engineering. This is a 3-month full-time contract role, focusing on web-first product experiences, APIs, and platform integrations. The Senior Software Engineer will develop features that are reusable across mobile web and native app surfaces, aiming to scale functionalities, deepen reader engagement, and increase user retention. This role involves building seamless handoffs between web and app, such as prompting personalized reading lists in the app, integrating webview-based games, or facilitating smooth transitions to web editing experiences.

Important: This is a fully remote position within a global organization. To ensure effective communication, at least four hours of your workday must overlap between 15:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC.

You are responsible for:

• Delivery and enablement: Leading medium-complexity initiatives from technical discovery through delivery. This includes breaking down initiatives into features, driving estimation, managing scope, identifying risks early, and making pragmatic tradeoffs across quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact.
• Frontend Implementation: Creating mobile Wikipedia product experiences for a global, multilingual audience across web and app surfaces. This involves designing and building accessible, adaptable, scalable, and reusable components.
• Backend Implementation: Developing RESTful APIs, from schema and contract design to monitoring and iteration, to serve simple yet scalable data pipelines for mobile and web client experiences. Ensuring APIs remain simple to consume, reliable to operate, and straightforward to evolve.
• Quality, testing and observability: Consistently building software that is easy to test, observe, and debug. Instrumenting features to enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partnering with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to shape pragmatic solutions that balance user needs, technical constraints, platform expectations, and delivery timelines.
• Prioritization: Proactively identifying high-impact technical opportunities and risks, working with the team to clarify priorities and sequencing, and keeping the team aligned on outcomes, capacity, and shared goals.
• Culture and standards: Complying with team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making, fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration.
• Operational Awareness: Planning work with awareness of downstream or upstream effects.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Clear communicator: Ability to explain ideas simply and adapt communication to diverse audiences across engineering, product, and non-technical teams in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• Autonomy: Operating with high autonomy in team and cross-team settings, taking end-to-end ownership of work, and practicing a culture of responsibility and follow-through.
• Feedback: Giving and receiving feedback with curiosity and empathy, and helping others resolve misunderstandings productively.
• Builds strong relationships: Proactively involving the right people in discussions and identifying process improvements.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: Ability to collaborate and solve complex problems with pragmatic solutions, connecting ideas, and balancing trade-offs across related domains.
• Knowledge sharing: Strong practices in documenting work for handover and consistently helping others understand and apply shared knowledge. Enjoying collaborative problem-solving and being open to feedback. Inspiring trust and progress through support, example, and thoughtful contributions.
• Outcome-oriented: Prioritizing work that delivers value to users and aligns with organizational goals, balancing ideal solutions with constraints of legacy systems, user expectations, and delivery needs.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree and 5-10+ years of related professional experience with significant experience building production web applications and services.
• Strong professional experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, JavaScript frameworks such as Vue.js, and backend languages such as PHP.
• Experience building responsive or mobile-first web experiences, with attention to performance, accessibility, and usability.
• Experience in designing and integrating with server-side APIs.
• Experience delivering in a self-driven, lean environment.
• Commitment to the Wikimedia Foundation's Mission and Values.

Additionally, we'd love it if you have:

• Experience adding webview-wrapped experiences to existing native mobile apps (iOS or Android).
• Experience in launching and maintaining native or cross-platform mobile applications (iOS or Android).
• Experience building mobile games or other interactive mobile experiences.
• Experience with data science, machine learning, and/or AI (e.g., familiarity with prompt engineering, Jupyter notebooks experience, etc.).
• Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress).
• Experience leveraging agentic coding to scale the work of small engineering teams.
• Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, management information systems, or STEM field (or equivalent certification).
• Prior experience with MediaWiki or Wikimedia projects.
• A history of open source contributions.
• Experience working in a fully remote, distributed team.

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, 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 40+ countries*. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range for this position for applicants based within the United States is US$56.07 to US$87.13, with individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, determining the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We do not ask for or take into consideration the salary history of applicants. 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
• Wyoming (*US Territory or Federal District)

Countries:

• Brazil
• Canada
• Colombia
• Germany
• Ghana
• India
• Indonesia
• Italy
• Kenya*
• Mexico
• Morocco
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Singapore*
• South Africa
• Spain
• Switzerland
• 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 and 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 [email protected] or +1 (415) 839-6885.

More information

• Applicant Privacy Policy
• Wikimedia Foundation
• What does the Wikimedia Foundation do?
• What makes Wikipedia different from social media platforms?
• Our Projects
• Our Tech Stack
• News from across the Wikimedia movement
• Wikimedia Blog
• Wikimedia 2030