Director of Engineering, MediaWiki

Director of Engineering, MediaWiki

Summary

The Director of Engineering, MediaWiki is accountable for the MediaWiki Engineering Group in the Wikimedia Foundation and is an active participant in the strategic decision making for the Product and Technology department and across the Wikimedia movement. The teams in this group build, maintain, and improve upon MediaWiki, the software platform that powers Wikipedia and its sister projects, used by hundreds of millions of people each month. MediaWiki has been built to enable the creation, moderation, storage, discovery and consumption of open content in different languages and at scale. As free and open source software, MediaWiki is also used by many other projects and sites.

The MediaWiki Engineering group includes the MediaWiki Interfaces, MediaWiki Platform, and Content Transform team. The monthly MediaWiki Insights have more information on the kind of challenges the team undertakes.

This role involves managing an engineering organization of about 25 including some very experienced Principal engineers and managers. The role reports to the Senior Director of Engineering and shares responsibility with the Director of Product for MediaWiki to iterate and execute on a holistic strategy for MediaWiki in collaboration with other engineering teams, product management, and the volunteer technical contributor community. The role will require developing a deep understanding of the community and its needs.

You are responsible for:

• Leading a group of teams working to build, maintain, and improve the capabilities of MediaWiki, the open-source software platform that powers Wikipedia and other sites.
• Living and demonstrating our values by fostering a working environment and team relationships that are aligned in our mission, welcoming to everyone who shares our vision and values, curious and open to new ideas, focused on delivering great work, and constantly improving.
• Hiring, Coaching, developing, and empowering engineering managers and highly senior individual contributors to enable their success in solving problems, delivering on team objectives, and coaching and developing their team members.
• Engineering delivery of the teams in the MediaWiki Engineering group.
• Collaborating with the Director of Product for MediaWiki on roadmaps and technical strategy.
• Participating with other senior managers & directors across the department to establish strategic plans, align towards common objectives, and solve complex problems.
• Participating in organizational development of methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for projects, programs, and people to ensure the greatest impact for the Foundation.
• Planning, staffing, budgeting, and managing expense priorities within the cost center for MediaWiki Engineering.
• Collaborating and taking joint responsibility with fellow Engineering leaders to ensure the stability, reliability and optimal performance of production environments and services.

Skills and Experience:

• Experience leading teams that manage software engineering lifecycle processes and services in an organization with 100+ software engineers.
• Experience leading or managing a backend platform organization.
• Experience managing organizational interaction with a community of volunteer technical contributors.
• Experience building and leading diverse, multi-national and remote-first teams.
• Proven success at all stages of the engineering process and product lifecycle, leading to significant, measurable impact.
• Experience with managing managers.
• Ability to travel up to 2-3 times a year.
• Ability to work flexible hours with an organization spread across several time zones.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Know and live our values.
• Experience with large-scale, global developer ecosystems.
• Serve as an ambassador for the Foundation and our movement to donors and the general public.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience contributing to or managing open source projects and communities, or experience with open governance (IETF, W3C, etc.).
• Familiarity with MediaWiki.
• Experience working with (high-traffic) systems powered by large, monolithic code bases.
• Experience editing Wikipedia or contributing to other wiki projects.
• Experience working with internationally distributed teams or organizations.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The W