Senior Software Engineer, Abstract Wikipedia

Senior Software Engineer, Abstract Wikipedia

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Abstract Wikipedia team, reporting to product engineering management. As a product software engineer, you will be responsible for software engineering for our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a mostly-remote environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write open source code for collaborative experiences supporting over a billion users, and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.

You are responsible for:

• Improving the Wikipedia product experience
• Iterating on new products and features through collaboration with designers and product managers
• Writing multilingual and accessible JavaScript, CSS, and PHP
• Creating and maintaining internet APIs with server scripting languages
• Instrumenting components to monitor feature and quality characteristics
• Leveraging caching and persistence technologies

Skills and experience:

• 5+ years related professional experience in functional programming or OOP
• Experience building user-friendly features and software components with good performance
• Focused software engineering: you enjoy writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and thoughtfully balancing architectural tradeoffs

Qualities that are important to us:

• 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

Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:

• Fluency in one or more regional languages in Africa, Asia, or Latin America
• Experience developing for markets in Africa, Asia, or Latin America
• Practical skills with Vue.js or React
• Project work in data science, machine learning, AI (especially on natural language)
• A history of open source contribution
• Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, management information systems, or STEM field (or equivalent certification)
• Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress). We grow and care for MediaWiki and Wikimedia specific services. MediaWiki is an open source, PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript web application that powers Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation websites. It has been incrementally developed for over 15 years to become a richly featured wiki engine and the basis for hundreds of extensions and skins, and has a vibrant volunteer community. Our services layers utilize a number of technologies.

The following team is actively seeking candidates:

• Abstract Wikipedia: We are building a new programming system, Wikifunctions, where a community will be able to write and arrange code functions in a multilingual way with multiple programming languages (Python and JavaScript to start, as well as with a low-code / no-code GUI). This will be a production grade function-as-a-service platform for Wikimedia volunteers to utilize as we work toward the larger initiative of symbolically generating natural language in all of Wikimedia's supported languages for Wikipedia. We are a dedicated group of diverse folks who build our values of feminism, decolonialism, and psychological safety into our everyday work. We work in a collaborative, high trust, high-empathy environment

The Wikimedia Foundation is... 

...the nonprofit organization that hosts and 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, free of interference. We host the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive financial support from millions