Senior Engineering Manager - Mediawiki Interfaces

Senior Engineering Manager - Mediawiki Interfaces

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for an Engineering Manager to join and lead the MediaWiki Interfaces team. This role reports to the Director, MediaWiki Engineering and involves directly managing an engineering team and partnering with the Product Manager, Mediawiki Interfaces on projects that empower others to build on top of MediaWiki through mechanisms such as Extensions and APIs.

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

Responsibilities

• Coach engineers of varying levels, helping them grow and set personal development goals and mentoring them where applicable in software engineering best practices.
• Ensure the timely shipping of deliverables by managing resources and schedules effectively.
• Produce a steady stream of cadenced deliveries and plan for maintenance and migration work.
• Communicate positively, effectively and proactively both within and outside of your team.
• Effectively triage incoming bugs, incidents, and one-off requests.
• Collaborate with other technical decision makers to identify long-term investment areas such as strategic migrations or adoption of new technologies.
• Assess scope and difficulty of tasks, examine patches or alerts, and judge problem severity and solution complexity.

Requirements

• Experience leading software engineering teams as a manager through various software development lifecycles.
• Experience leading or managing a backend platform.
• Experience building a diverse, multi-national and remote-first team.
• Proven success at all stages of the engineering process and product lifecycle, leading to significant, measurable impact.
• Ability to travel internationally up to 2-3 times a year.
• Your working hours will need to overlap with UTC+2 to UTC-7 time zones to accommodate members of your team around the world.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience managing organizational interaction with a community of volunteer technical contributors.
• 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 working with internationally distributed teams or organizations.

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. We host Wikipedia and 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 donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protec