Senior Software Engineer, iOS (Contract) - Wikimedia Foundation

Summary

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

The App Growth team has a clear and ambitious goal: make the apps the destination for knowledge lovers and grow our active readership. The team owns the cross-platform feature framework for the app, making decisions about where a feature lives when the app is the destination and where its primary value is unlocked.

Important: We are a fully remote team at a global organization. To ensure there are enough opportunities to communicate, this role requires at least four hours of your work day to occur between 14:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC.

Responsibilities

• Delivery and Enablement: Lead delivery of medium-complexity initiatives from technical discovery through delivery. Break down initiatives into features, drive estimation, and manage scope. Identify risks early and help the team make pragmatic tradeoffs across quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact.
• Implementation: Improve mobile Wikipedia product experiences serving a global, multilingual audience on iOS. Lead system design for medium-sized projects and build accessible, adaptable, scalable components.
• Quality, Testing & Observability: Consistently build software that is easy to test, observe, and debug. Instrument features to enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to shape pragmatic solutions balancing user needs, technical constraints, platform expectations, and delivery timelines.
• Prioritization: Proactively identify high-impact technical opportunities and risks across the engagement timeframe. Work with the team to clarify priorities, sequencing, and shared goals.
• Culture & Standards: Comply with team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making.
• Operational Awareness: Plan work with awareness of downstream or upstream effects.

Qualities Important to Us

• Clear Communicator: Explain ideas simply and adapt communication to technical and non-technical audiences across synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• Autonomy: Operate with high autonomy in team settings; practice a culture of responsibility and follow-through.
• Feedback: Give and receive feedback with curiosity and empathy.
• Relationship Building: Proactively bring the right people into discussions and identify process improvements.
• Comfortable with Ambiguity: Collaborate to solve complex problems with pragmatic solutions while balancing trade-offs.
• Knowledge Sharing: Practice strong documentation and knowledge-sharing habits.
• Outcome-Oriented: Prioritize 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 iOS applications.
• Strong professional experience and proficiency with Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, and iOS architectural patterns.
• Experience with iOS performance optimization techniques to ensure smooth, responsive, and high-performing applications.
• Experience working in a self-driven, lean environment.
• Commitment to the Foundation's Mission and Values.

Nice to Have

• Experience adding webview-wrapped experiences to existing native mobile apps (iOS or Android).
• Experience maintaining cross-platform mobile applications.
• Experience building mobile games or interactive mobile 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 (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress).
• Experience leveraging agentic coding to scale engineering efforts.
• Degree in Computer Science, MIS, or STEM field.
• Prior experience with MediaWiki or Wikimedia projects.
• History of open source contributions.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. We are a charitable 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, operating with a global, remote-first team.