Staff Systems Architect

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Staff Systems Architect to join our Architecture Team. This role is responsible for identifying, building support, and gaining stakeholder support to address Wikimedia’s most pressing socio-technical needs. You will work remotely and collaboratively across the organization and movement, ensuring our systems enable users to collect, share and distribute the knowledge contained in Wikimedia Projects while also ensuring our systems are resilient, secure, and scalable. Over the past years, we have sketched a target architecture, collaborated to launch Wikimedia Enterprise, supported Product Teams, and worked to establish an architecture practice. To understand more about our overall approach here is a blog post describing how we think about transiting from software to systems. The work we accomplish is strongly guided by our organizational values. 

As a strong candidate, you have a deep commitment to collective reasoning, strengthening the expert thinking of others, and asking the right questions. You have led and designed socio-technical change at organizations and have experience transitioning monolithic systems to a more modular and distributed approach. You are excited about designing for emergence and reaching big end goals.

You are responsible for:

• Working cross-functionally by collaborating with engineers, product managers, and executives within the Wikimedia Foundation and its partners to model and design an iterative approach to evolve the architecture to deliver on the principles of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity
• Developing and leading internal workshops to gain insight into domains, workflows, and other system needs
• Contributing to implementing plans in conjunction with development teams
• Socializing and communicating architecture designs across Wikimedia stakeholders
• Facilitating and making decisions considering the holistic needs of the Wikimedia socio-technical system
• Working directly on sprint teams as needed to develop proof of concepts

Skills and Experience:

• Ability to communicate and facilitate across cross-functional groups
• Portfolio of tools for modeling, especially interfaces and communications across system components
• You have experience migrating legacy systems to modern architectures. Specially systems utilizing patterns such as CQRS, loose coupling, microservices and building an ecosystem of components
• You have worked on event driven, incremental and service oriented architectures
• You have created a variety of architecture artifacts, choosing the right style of delivery for the audience and are well versed in framing a problem
• Deeply committed to collaborative work and strengthening ideas together
• Able to stay motivated while working towards a long-term goal and celebrate successes along the way
• Know at least one programming language well, but have knowledge in a variety of languages. You are comfortable with compiled and scripting languages
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, related field or equivalent in related work experience. Do not feel you need a degree to apply; we value hands-on experience most of all

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience using Domain Driven Design
• Experience with open source technology and free culture, and have contributed to open source projects
• Experience working remotely
• You are a contributor to Wikipedia, Wikidata or other Wikimedia projects

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 protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or +1 (415) 839-6885.