Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team

The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. The Senior Software Engineer will design and deliver improvements to Wikipedia's wikitext processing infrastructure, build APIs and software components, and collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, client teams, and community members. The role also involves monitoring systems, leveraging caching and persistence technologies, and contributing to open-source software in a remote-first environment.

Responsibilities:

• Designing and delivering improvements to Wikipedia's wikitext processing infrastructure, balancing user experience, performance, backwards compatibility, and maintainability
• Iterating on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, client teams, and community members
• Writing PHP and JavaScript which supports hundreds of world languages
• Creating and maintaining internet APIs with server scripting languages
• Instrumenting components to monitor feature and quality characteristics
• Leveraging caching and persistence technologies

Requirements:

• 5+ years of related professional experience in software engineering
• Experience with one or more of: parser generators, interpreters, language runtimes, compilers, or bringing a language feature through a product cycle
• Demonstrated ability to own complex technical projects from problem definition through implementation and delivery, including making and communicating architectural decisions and navigating ambiguity
• Experience designing and maintaining reliable, performant software components used by other teams, products, or large numbers of users
• Strong engineering practices: you enjoy writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and balancing architectural tradeoffs
• Ability to work effectively across team and organizational boundaries, identify and resolve technical dependencies, and bring projects to completion with limited direction
• Experience mentoring other engineers and raising the technical quality of a team, through code reviews, design discussions, documentation, or direct mentorship
• 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
• Self motivated with an ability to navigate through ambiguity and bring a project to completion with limited direction
• Familiarity with the HTML5 spec and DOM manipulation
• Expertise in Node.js and related technologies
• Familiarity with Wikipedia/wikitext/markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress)
• A history of open source contribution
• Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, software engineering, or other STEM field (or equivalent certification)