Software Engineer - Web Team

Software Engineer - Web Team

Summary

On the Web Team, we work to improve the user experience for the readers of Wikimedia sites. These readers are responsible for 25 Billion monthly page views, from up to 2 Billion unique devices. 

We’re currently working to bring dark mode and font size customization to our users, as well as enhancements to the accessibility of our pages. We are exploring a future focused on growing our platform capabilities, and working with our communities to improve the flexibility and consistency of the user experience across the desktop and mobile web. As a full stack engineer – with both backend and frontend experience – you will be responsible for making changes to both our javascript-based frontend and our PHP-based backend code. For this role, the majority of your time will be spent on the frontend user experience and our skins-based templating system, but you will also be asked to make changes to backend services, metrics, and other non-user-facing code.  You should be comfortable with benchmarking, running synthetic tests and have an understanding of XSS and how to prevent them, as well as productioning backend services. 

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:

• 2-5 years related professional experience in a related field
• Experience building user-friendly features and software components with good performance
• Experience working on backend services with high availability and uptime
• 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:

• Fluency in one or more regional languages in Africa, Asia, or Latin America
• Practical skills with Vue.js or React
• Project work in data science, machine learning, AI (especially in 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 utilize a number of technologies.
• Experience in or interest in developing for markets in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

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 equi