Site Reliability Engineer

Summary

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to join our SRE Traffic team in supporting and developing the platform that serves the world’s favorite encyclopedia to millions of people around the globe. Wikipedia and its sister projects are powered by Free and Open Source software and infrastructure. The SRE Traffic team’s primary responsibility is the development and operation of a private and privacy-protecting global CDN for Wikipedia and related sister projects.

Our Traffic stack handles public DNS, global request routing, TLS termination, HTTP content caching, and internal service routing for the public services the Foundation operates. It acts as the edge layer between the wild public Internet and all of our internal software and infrastructure, handling ~12 billion encrypted HTTP requests per day, or ~140,000 per second on average, from edge server sites in California, Texas, and Virginia in the US, and the Netherlands and Singapore abroad. We currently employ Varnish and Apache Traffic Server for the most complex HTTP caching, manipulation, and request-routing parts of our stack.

We are a globally distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment and embrace new technologies. If you find what we do interesting, if you are up to the challenge of improving the reliability and delivery of one of the Internet’s top 10 websites, and you enjoy the idea of working in a remote-first role, we may just be the right place for you.

You are responsible for:

• Operating and helping to improve the design of the CDN edge of Wikimedia’s infrastructure
• Responding to common traffic issues following documented procedures
• Performing day-to-day operational tasks on Wikimedia’s public facing infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting)
• Utilizing configuration management and deployment tools
• Monitoring systems and services
• Assisting with incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
• Sharing our values and working in accordance with them

Skills and Experience:

• Some experience working as part of an SRE/Operations/DevOps team, or similar
• A working knowledge of the core protocols of the Internet, especially TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, and TLS
• Operational experience with one or more open source HTTP server and/or proxy softwares (such as Apache, Nginx, Haproxy, Envoy, Varnish, ATS, etc) running on a Linux server platform.
• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Qualities that are important to us:

• Some programming and/or scripting experience solving real problems in any language
• Strong English language skills and ability to work effectively and often asynchronously as part of a globally distributed team  

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Familiarity with the debugging and performance tracing of HTTP requests through various proxy/caching layers
• Familiarity with global Internet infrastructure and routing
• Comfort with shell and scripting languages used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, etc.)
• Low level systems troubleshooting and debugging skills
• Prior experience contributing to Free and Open Source software projects or communities in any capacity