Engineering Management

Summary

Love Wikipedia and its sibling projects? The Wikimedia Foundation is an inclusive employer, and we are looking for experienced engineering management to join our team, reporting to engineering leadership in Technology and Product Engineering.

We’re committed to making knowledge available to everyone globally. This is an opportunity to do good while improving what we think is the best place on the internet. You know how to build a sustainable culture, showing empathy for users and employees, a collaborative mindset, and data-informed systems thinking. You are passionate about growing people, helping software engineers achieve their career goals while also creating amazing opportunities for them to flourish and improve technically.

In this role, you will work in a distributed remote environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach as we build fully open source software. You are a proactive and collaborative partner with product management, design, quality & test engineering, technical program management, and community relations. You will manage highly skilled engineers, who ship quality software used by over a billion users, empowering them to do their best work.

Travel is not currently required due to the pandemic. During normal non-pandemic times, some travel is expected, usually 3-4 times per year.

You are responsible for:

• Fostering a supportive team environment, ensuring diverse voices are heard
• Guiding team members with structured development techniques
• Coaching engineers in the art and science of software engineering and evolvable software architecture
• Participating in hiring considerate of diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Partnering with peers on cross-team delivery and radiating organizational updates
• Facilitating product technical strategy and roadmap setting with software engineers and technical product management
• Supervising budget and staffing

Skills and Experience:

• Expertise in consumer-facing internet technology for large and diverse audiences
• History of developing high productivity engineering teams
• BS/MS/Ph.D in Computer Science or other relevant technical field or the equivalent in work experience

Qualities that are important to us:

• A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access
• Clear communication in both synchronous and asynchronous channels

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Fluency in one or more regional languages of Africa or Asia
• Experience with service based and streaming architectures
• 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.

The following teams are actively seeking candidates:

• Abstract Wikipedia: We are building a new programming system, Wikifunctions, where a community will be able to write code functions in a multilingual way with multiple programming languages (Python and JavaScript to start). 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 with use of Wikidata Lexemes and Wikifunctions entries.
• Campaigns: Our vibrant global network of Wikimedia organizers run content campaigns such as Wiki Loves Monuments, Art + Feminism, Wiki Loves Human Rights, and Wikimedia Asian Month that focus on new and experienced contributors, and are a key mechanism of content development on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and other Wikimedia projects. Our work aims to improve the experience for campaign organizers and campaign participants, so they can more effectively take part in the Wikimedia movement.
• Platform: The Platform Engineering Team is responsible for the maintenance and development of the MediaWiki and Wikimedia specific services that allow our software to scale to serve millions of users.