Summary

In this role, you will work in a distributed remote environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach as we build fully open source software. You are a proactive and collaborative partner with product management, design, quality & test engineering, technical program management, and community relations. You will manage highly skilled engineers, who ship quality software used by over a billion users, empowering them to do their best work.

Travel is not currently required due to the pandemic. During normal non-pandemic times, some travel is expected, usually 3-4 times per year.

Requirements

Skills and Experience:

• Expertise in consumer-facing internet technology for large and diverse audiences
• History of developing high productivity engineering teams
• BS/MS/Ph.D in Computer Science or other relevant technical field or the equivalent in work experience

Qualities that are important to us:

• A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access
• Clear communication in both synchronous and asynchronous channels

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Fluency in one or more regional languages of Africa or Asia
• Experience with service based and streaming architectures
• 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.

The following teams are actively seeking candidates:

• Campaigns: Our vibrant global network of Wikimedia organizers run content campaigns such as Wiki Loves Monuments, Art + Feminism, Wiki Loves Human Rights, and Wikimedia Asian Month that focus on new and experienced contributors, and are a key mechanism of content development on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and other Wikimedia projects. Our work aims to improve the experience for campaign organizers and campaign participants, so they can more effectively take part in the Wikimedia movement.
• Content Transform Team: We support and evolve technologies central to the editing and reading experiences on Wikipedia. These include wikitext used extensively in editing Wikipedia, structured markup formats that nicely support both machine readability and WYSIWYG experiences, optimized content APIs for Wikipedia on the web & apps, and multi-tier maps infrastructure. We strive to make it easier for Wikimedians to edit and communicate with each other, and faster to preview and incorporate their high quality contributions across the Wikimedia projects spanning hundreds of human languages.
• Platform: The Platform Engineering Team is responsible for the maintenance and development of the MediaWiki and Wikimedia specific services that allow our software to scale to serve millions of users.
• Performance Team: The Engineering Productivity Team is the heart of how software development gets done at the Foundation; we are responsible for everything from development environments, code review, CI and testing infrastructure, performance testing and reviews, to deploying. You will be managing a team responsible for creating a culture of performance at the Foundation with a focus on outreach (internally and externally), monitoring, knowledge, and improvement. The Performance Team creates value for readers and editors by making it possible to retrieve and render content at the speed of thought, from anywhere in the world, on the broadest range of devices and connection profiles. We focus on providing equal access to a frustration-free experience, regardless of whether someone is using a brand-new laptop on a fast network in a large metropolitan area, or if they’re using an inexpensive mobile device in a rural area with unreliable internet connectivity

Responsibilities

You are responsible for:

• Fostering a supportive team environment, ensuring diverse voices are heard
• Guiding team members with structured development techniques
• Coaching engineers in the art and science of software engineering and evolvable software architecture
• Participating in hiring considerate of diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Partnering with peers on cross-team delivery and radiating organizational updates
• Facilitating product technical strategy and roadmap setting with software engineers and technical product management
• Supervising budget and staffing