Senior Software Engineer, Core Experiences (Contract) - Wikimedia Foundation

Summary

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

This is not a native iOS or Android role. It is focused on web-first product experiences, APIs, and platform integrations that can be reused across mobile web and native app surfaces. You will help scale features across platforms and create compelling experiences that deepen reader engagement and increase user retention. You will build features that create natural handoffs between web and app—such as prompting a reader to try a personalized reading list in the app, creating a game integrated within the apps as a webview, or providing a smooth transition to the web editing experience.

Note: We are a fully remote team at a global organization. To ensure sufficient synchronous collaboration, this role requires at least four hours of your workday to occur between 15:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC.

Responsibilities

• Delivery and Enablement: Deliver medium-complexity initiatives from technical discovery through release. Break down initiatives into features, drive estimation, manage scope, and identify risks early to balance quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact.
• Frontend Implementation: Create mobile Wikipedia product experiences for a global, multilingual audience across web and app surfaces, building accessible, adaptable, scalable, and reusable components.
• Backend Implementation: Design and build RESTful APIs and simple, scalable data pipelines for mobile and web client experiences, ensuring reliable operation and maintainability over time.
• Quality, Testing, and Observability: Build testable, observable, and debuggable software. Instrument features to enable deep analysis by Product Analysts.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to shape pragmatic technical solutions.
• Prioritization: Proactively identify high-impact technical opportunities and risks across the engagement timeframe and keep the team aligned on outcomes and capacity.
• Culture and Standards: Uphold team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making.
• Operational Awareness: Plan engineering work with an understanding of downstream and upstream effects.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree and 5–10+ years of professional software engineering experience building production web applications and services.
• Strong professional experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, frontend frameworks such as Vue.js, and backend languages such as PHP.
• Experience building responsive or mobile-first web experiences with high attention to performance, accessibility, and usability.
• Experience designing and integrating with server-side RESTful APIs.
• Proven track record of delivering effectively in a self-driven, lean environment.
• Commitment to the Wikimedia Foundation's mission and values.

Nice to Have

• Experience adding webview-wrapped experiences to existing native mobile apps (iOS or Android).
• Experience launching and maintaining native or cross-platform mobile applications.
• Experience building mobile games or interactive mobile experiences.
• Familiarity with data science, machine learning, and AI concepts (e.g., prompt engineering, Jupyter notebooks).
• Familiarity with Wikipedia, wikitext, markdown editing, or CMS platforms (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress).
• Experience leveraging agentic coding tools to scale engineering velocity.
• History of open source contributions.
• Prior experience working in a fully remote, distributed team environment.