Software Engineer - Moderator Tools

Software Engineer - Moderator Tools (Full Stack)

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a product software engineer to join the Moderator Tools team, reporting to product engineering management. As a product engineer, you will be responsible for building out components for our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a remote environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write open-source code for collaborative experiences supporting over half a billion pages accessed per day, and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.

On the Moderator Tools team, we build and improve tools for Wikimedia’s volunteer patrollers and administrators, improving their ability to review and take action on bad content across Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia’s reliability and trustworthiness is in large part a result of the efforts of these volunteers, who review new edits, revert vandalism, block bad actors, and protect important content. We are currently working on a project to enable communities to configure automated detection and reversion of bad edits, giving them more capacity for content moderation tasks, in addition to other projects that support moderators and editors.

You are responsible for:

• Improving the content moderation experience by building new functionality primarily for the Automoderator project.
• Fixing bugs for code that our team maintains, including The Wikipedia Library codebases.
• Collaborating with product managers, designers, and other teams on shared projects.
• Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant user interfaces using JavaScript, PHP, VueJS, and CSS.
• Building on top of existing Design System Library components in our ecosystem and writing new ones when needed.
• Building on top of existing MediaWiki APIs in our ecosystem.
• Extending the capabilities of the MediaWiki stack to serve diverse community needs by incorporating possibilities that are offered by new tooling or technical advances.
• Writing unit and integration tests
• Proactively addressing security and code review feedback
• Working across teams to proactively reduce technical debt by refactoring code, updating testing frameworks, and reviewing code from other engineers.
• Instrumenting components to monitor user behavior and performance characteristics

Skills and experience:

• 3-5 years related professional experience in programming roles with some understanding in fundamental frontend and backend concepts.
• Experience in JavaScript.
• Experience in PHP or Python.
• A demonstrated ability to deliver features collaboratively in a team environment.
• Experience converting design mockups into functional components
• Experience with incorporating performance and accessibility into features.
• Experience in writing well-documented and readable code

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.
• A willingness to incorporate new technical approaches and engineering thought patterns towards solving problems.
• Interest in mentoring, or teaching and sharing technical knowledge.

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

• Experience working with internationally distributed teams or organizations
• Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress)
• Experience with  Bash, Django, VueJS, and/or Docker
• Experience working with projects or communities in languages other than English
• Experience working with large, legacy codebases

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