Senior Software Engineer, Core Experiences (Contract)

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation seeks a full stack Senior Software Web Engineer contractor to join the App Growth team within Core Experiences engineering. This is a 3-month, full-time contract role.

This position focuses on web-first product experiences, APIs, and platform integrations. The goal is to scale features across mobile web and native app surfaces, deepen reader engagement, and increase user retention. You will build features that create natural handoffs between web and app, guiding users to the right place, such as prompting personalized reading lists in the app, integrating webview games, or ensuring smooth transitions to web editing experiences.

Important: This is a fully remote team within a global organization. To facilitate 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: Drive medium-complexity initiatives from technical discovery to delivery. Break down initiatives into features, manage scope, and estimate. Identify risks early and make pragmatic tradeoffs across quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact.
• Frontend Implementation: Create mobile Wikipedia product experiences for a global, multilingual audience across web and app surfaces. Design and build accessible, adaptable, scalable, and reusable components.
• Backend Implementation: Develop RESTful APIs, from schema and contract design to monitoring and iteration, to serve simple yet scalable data pipelines for mobile and web client experiences. Ensure APIs are easy to consume, reliable to operate, and straightforward to evolve.
• Quality, testing, and observability: Consistently build software that is easy to test, observe, and debug. Instrument features to enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to shape pragmatic solutions balancing user needs, technical constraints, platform expectations, and delivery timelines.
• Prioritization: Proactively identify high-impact technical opportunities and risks. Work with the team to clarify priorities and sequencing, keeping the team aligned on outcomes, capacity, and shared goals.
• Culture and standards: Comply with team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making, fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration.
• Operational Awareness: Plan work with awareness of downstream or upstream effects.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Clear communicator: Explain ideas simply and adapt communication to diverse audiences (engineering, product, non-technical) in synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• Autonomy: Operate with high autonomy in team and cross-team settings. Own your work end-to-end, practicing responsibility and follow-through.
• Feedback: Give and receive feedback with curiosity and empathy, helping resolve misunderstandings productively.
• Builds strong relationships: Proactively involve the right people in discussions and identify process improvements.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: Collaborate to solve complex problems with pragmatic solutions. Connect ideas and balance trade-offs across related domains to create well-rounded solutions.
• Knowledge sharing: Strong knowledge-sharing practices, documenting work for handover, and helping others understand and apply shared knowledge. Enjoy problem-solving with others and are open to feedback. Inspire trust and progress through support, example, and thoughtful contributions.
• Outcome-oriented: Prioritize work that delivers value to users and aligns with organizational goals, balancing ideal solutions with legacy constraints, user expectations, and delivery needs.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree and 5-10+ years of professional 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 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).
• 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, 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 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$56.07 to US$87.13 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.

Countries: Brazil, Canada, Colombia, 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.

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 [email protected] or +1 (415) 839-6885.

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