Senior Frontend Engineer, Abstract Wikipedia at Wikimedia Foundation

Summary

• The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Frontend Engineer to participate in our work on Abstract Wikipedia, a project that aims to improve knowledge equity by enabling more people to share more knowledge in more languages.
• We’re committed to making knowledge available to everyone globally. This is an opportunity to do good while building a system to support new technology at the intersection of collaborative systems, natural language generation, and computational linguistics.
• Our geographically-distributed team is writing the code to build Wikifunctions, a new technology to enable a collaboratively edited catalog of computer functions that will power Abstract Wikipedia. Working in the open alongside our community is the norm.
• The Wikimedia Foundation values diversity and recognizes that employees from a broad range of perspectives are essential to creating a knowledge source that benefits everyone. We are committed to inclusion, diversifying tech, and advocating for diversity in our employees, their experiences, and the people we serve.
• Our teams build products that enable our communities to achieve our Vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

You will be responsible for:

• Designing and building robust and scalable systems, together with a multidisciplinary team, to support knowledge equity.
• Becoming familiar with a new codebase and how it interacts with a large, mature codebase to drive engineering solutions.
• Supporting fellow engineers through code reviews, transferring knowledge, collaborating on projects, and writing documentation.

Requirements:

• Familiarity with modern JavaScript frameworks and libraries (e.g., Vue.js, React).
• Minimum of 3-5 years of work experience in software development.
• An interest in and ability to work with a distributed team (which requires good asynchronous written communication skills and good verbal communication skills in English).
• Ability to interact effectively and develop productive working relationships with management, peers, and communities, including non-technical staff.
• Must be comfortable with evolving requirements and priorities in a dynamic environment.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Experience with large-scale, global developer ecosystems.
• Alignment with our mission and values.
• Resilience—we work on new and interesting problems in public and collaboratively.
• Working together for outcomes and being willing to change course.
• Sharing a culture of constructive criticism and respect.

Additionally, we would love it if you have:

• Experience with the Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons communities, or other collaborative enterprises.
• Familiarity with MediaWiki.
• Experience in developing systems using structured content, knowledge graphs, or taxonomies.
• Experience developing Web-scale deployments in PHP.
• Experience with open source development methodologies and open source community.
• An interest in natural language generation and/or computational linguistics.