Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team - Wikimedia Foundation

Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the MediaWiki Content Platform Team. This is a remote-first role with occasional travel for team events.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will engineer software that supports our product user experiences. You will work in a fully-remote environment, valuing teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You'll contribute to open-source code for collaborative experiences used by over half a billion pages daily.

The Content Platform team focuses on supporting and evolving wikitext, the markup language behind Wikipedia. Our goals include making wikitext easier to write, faster to parse, and less error-prone, while also supporting editing and content analysis tools with structured representations. We also maintain web services for content rendering and transformation.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver improvements to Wikipedia's wikitext processing infrastructure, balancing user experience, performance, backwards compatibility, and maintainability.
• Iterate on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, client teams, and community members.
• Write PHP and JavaScript that supports hundreds of world languages.
• Create and maintain internet APIs with server scripting languages.
• Instrument components to monitor feature and quality characteristics.
• Leverage caching and persistence technologies.

Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of related professional experience in software engineering.
• Experience with one or more of: parser generators, interpreters, language runtimes, compilers, or bringing a language feature through a product cycle.
• Demonstrated ability to own complex technical projects from problem definition through implementation and delivery, including making and communicating architectural decisions and navigating ambiguity.
• Experience designing and maintaining reliable, performant software components used by other teams, products, or large numbers of users.
• Strong engineering practices: enjoy writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and balancing architectural tradeoffs.
• Ability to work effectively across team and organizational boundaries, identify and resolve technical dependencies, and bring projects to completion with limited direction.
• Experience mentoring other engineers and raising the technical quality of a team, through code reviews, design discussions, documentation, or direct mentorship.

Desired Qualities

• 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.
• Self-motivated with an ability to navigate through ambiguity and bring a project to completion with limited direction.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with the HTML5 spec and DOM manipulation.
• Expertise in Node.js and related technologies.
• Familiarity with Wikipedia/wikitext/markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress).
• A history of open-source contribution.
• Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, software engineering, or other STEM field (or equivalent certification).

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.

Location Details

This role is remote-first. The preferred timezone for this candidate will be GMT-4 to GMT+2 to ensure sufficient overlap for communication. The Wikimedia Foundation is able to hire in the following locations:

US States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Countries: Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Note: Non-US employees are hired through a local third-party Employer of Record (EOR) and must have current work authorization in their location. Some locations require citizenship/permanent residency.