Senior Software Engineer, Android - Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Android to support the App Experience and App Growth teams within the Core Experiences engineering group. Our teams have a clear and ambitious goal: make our apps the destination for knowledge lovers and grow our active readership.

Availability

It’s important to state that we are a fully remote team at a global organisation. To ensure there are enough opportunities to communicate, this role needs at least four hours of your workday to occur between 15:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC.

You Are Responsible For

• Delivery and enablement: Delivery of medium complexity initiatives from technical discovery through delivery. Breaks down initiatives into features, drives estimation, and manages scope. Identifies risks early and helps the team make pragmatic tradeoffs across quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact.
• Implementation: Improving the mobile Wikipedia product experiences that serve a global, multilingual audience on Android. Leads system design for medium-sized projects and can design and build accessible, adaptable, scalable components.
• Quality, testing, and observability: Consistently builds software that is easy to test, observe, and debug. Instruments features that enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partners with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to shape pragmatic solutions that balance user needs, technical constraints, platform expectations, and delivery timelines.
• Prioritisation: Proactively identifies high-impact technical opportunities and risks across the engagement timeframe, works with the team to clarify priorities and sequencing, and keeps the team aligned on outcomes, capacity, and shared goals.
• Culture and standards: Complies with team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making—fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration.
• Operational awareness: Plans work with awareness of downstream or upstream effects.

Qualities That Are Important To Us

• Clear communicator: You can explain your ideas simply and adapt your communication to different audiences across engineering, product, and non-technical stakeholders in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• Autonomy: Operates with high autonomy in a team and cross-team setting, owning work end-to-end and practicing responsibility and follow-through.
• Feedback: Gives and receives feedback with curiosity and empathy, helping others resolve misunderstandings productively.
• Builds strong relationships: Proactively brings the right people into discussions and identifies process improvements.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: Solves complex problems with pragmatic solutions while balancing trade-offs across related domains.
• Knowledge sharing: Strong knowledge-sharing practices, documents work for handover, and helps others understand and apply shared knowledge.
• Outcome-oriented: Prioritizes work that delivers value to users and aligns with organizational goals.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree and 5-10+ years of related professional experience with significant experience building Android applications.
• Strong professional experience and proficiency with Kotlin, XML, Jetpack Compose, and familiarity with architectural patterns in Android.
• Experience with Android performance optimization techniques to ensure smooth, responsive, and high-performing applications under a variety of conditions.
• Experience working in a self-driven, lean environment.
• Commitment to the Foundation's Mission and Values.

Bonus Qualifications

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

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.