Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team

Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team

The Wikimedia Foundation seeks a Senior Software Engineer to join our team, reporting to engineering management. This role involves engineering software to enhance product user experiences within a fully-remote environment. We emphasize teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach, offering the opportunity to write open source code for collaborative experiences that support over half a billion daily page accesses, all while promoting a healthy work-life balance.

The Content Platform team focuses on supporting and evolving wikitext, Wikipedia's markup language. Our goal is to make wikitext easier to write, faster to parse, and less error-prone. We also develop structured representations to support editing and content analysis tools, and maintain web services for content rendering and transformation.

This is a mostly-remote position. To facilitate communication, the preferred timezone for candidates is GMT-4 to GMT+2.

You are responsible for:

• 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 to support hundreds of world languages.
• Creating and maintaining internet APIs using server scripting languages.
• Instrumenting components to monitor feature and quality characteristics.
• Leveraging caching and persistence technologies.

Skills and experience:

• 5+ years of 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.
• Experience designing and maintaining reliable, performant software components used by other teams, products, or large numbers of users.
• Strong engineering practices, including writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and balancing architectural tradeoffs.
• Ability 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.

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.
• Self-motivated with an ability to navigate through ambiguity and bring a project to completion with limited direction.

Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:

• 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). MediaWiki is an open source, PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript web application powering Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation websites. It has been incrementally developed over many years into a richly featured wiki engine, forming the basis for hundreds of extensions and skins, and supported by a vibrant volunteer community.
• A history of open source contribution.
• 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 other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world where every human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe everyone has the potential to contribute to shared knowledge and should access it freely. We host Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support volunteer communities and partners, and advocate for policies enabling Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization relying on donations from millions of individuals worldwide, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive 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 a diverse workforce and continuously strives for an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds. We do not discriminate based on 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 and contractors based in 40+ countries. Salaries are competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range for US-based applicants is US$116,633 to US$181,243, with individualized factors like cost of living determining the offered pay. For applicants outside the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We do not ask for or consider salary history. Compensation for a successful applicant will be based on skills, experience, and location.

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).

For US-based applicants: this position is part of the Communication Workers of America bargaining unit.

We are also able to hire in the following 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. (*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.

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