Job Opportunity for Senior Software Engineer – Growth at Wikimedia Foundation

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for product software engineers to join the Growth 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 half a billion pages accessed per day, and you get to do it at a place that believes we’re all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.

On the Growth team, we work to help new people start editing Wikipedia by introducing new editing workflows that are a fit for more people on more devices all around the world. We build a cohesive experience for newcomers, helping them find a place in our communities, connect with others, and start contributing their knowledge. Our main projects have focused on machine-learning driven task recommendations and volunteer mentorship.

You are responsible for:

• Improving the Wikipedia new contributor experience by building new functionality primarily in the GrowthExperiments extension and fixing bugs for code that our team maintains
• Collaborating with product managers, designers, and other teams on shared projects
• Writing multilingual and accessible software using JavaScript, PHP and CSS
• Building on top of existing APIs in our ecosystem and writing new ones when needed, working with other engineers to reduce technical debt
• Instrumenting components to monitor user behavior and performance characteristics

Skills and experience:

• 5+ years related professional experience in frontend and backend programming
• Experience building user-friendly features and software components using well-documented and readable code
• Focused software engineering: you enjoy writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and thoughtfully balancing architectural trade-offs

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
• Interest in mentoring, or teaching and sharing about technical knowledge

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

• Experience working with internationally distributed teams or organizations
• Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress)
• Experience working with projects or communities in languages other than English
• Experience working with large, legacy codebases
• Bachelor’s in a relevant field or equivalent experience

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.