Jobs at Wikimedia Foundation

We are a dedicated group of diverse folks who build our values of feminism, decolonialism, and psychological safety into our everyday work. We work in a collaborative, high trust, high-empathy environment.

You are responsible for:

• Building a strong understanding of our current deployment processes
• Identifying current challenges of getting high quality software to production where multiple tiers of architecture and complex user generated content are involved.
• Collaborating with stakeholders to develop a path to production that enables development teams to reliably deliver high quality software to production in a self service manner.

Skills and Experience:

• Demonstrated ability collaborating across teams and leading cross-functional efforts.
• Extensive professional experience with Software Quality principles.
• Professional experience with continuous integration and deployment.
• Professional experience with test automation technologies
• Demonstrated advanced understanding of functional or object-oriented programming.
• Demonstrated ability to understand and apply new technologies

Qualities that are important to us:

• A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access
• A detail-oriented mindset
• An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels

Additionally, we'd love it if you have:

• Experience working with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• A history of open source contribution
• Bachelor's degree in CS, engineering or related field OR the equivalent in relevant work experience
• Experience testing sites in non-Western languages including right-to-left languages

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Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Database Administrator to join our SRE team to build, optimize and support the platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopædia to millions of people around the globe. Wikipedia and its sister projects are a globally distributed architecture powered strictly by Free and Open Source software. The stack has MediaWiki at its core and MariaDB as its data store, surrounded by an ecosystem of microservices in PHP, NodeJS, Python, Go and Java.

The Wikimedia community continuously generates text content in the form of new articles, revisions and discussions. As part of our team you would have the opportunity to solve the storage, scaling, access and backup challenges that Wikipedias’ scale provides.

We currently use self-hosted MariaDB as our main RDBMS. Our goal is configuring and managing the database infrastructure in a way that maximizes the service uptime for Wikimedia projects’ users while at the same time simplifying the operational processes, automating repeatable tasks and applying industry best practices.

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 be the right place for you.

You are responsible for:

• Operate and improve the RDBMS systems serving Wikimedia projects
• Respond to common database issues, following documented procedures
• Collaborate with SRE and other teams across the organization to ensure their specific database needs are met on an ongoing basis
• Perform day-to-day operational/DevOps tasks on Wikimedia’s public facing infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting)
• Implement and utilize configuration management and deployment tools
• Monitor systems, services and service clusters, optimize performance and resource utilization
• Participate in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
• Share our values and work in accordance with them

Skills and Experience:

• 2+ years experience in a DBA  role as part of a team
• 3+ years experience with Linux in a production environment
• Knowledge and experience of (Free and Open Source) RDBMS (preferably MariaDB or MySQL) administration (understanding of and experience with replication is essential) and support, debugging query performance and schema design
• Comfortable with shell and at least one of the scripting languages used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, etc.)
• Passion for automating tasks and processes
• Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience  

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience working with or as a part of  SRE/Operations/DevOps teams
• Experience with NoSQL products (Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc.)
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/redis, MySQL) - MediaWiki familiarity would be great!
• Developing Free and Open Source software, or being part of an open-source community

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Summary

If you’re a current law student or recent law school graduate passionate about free knowledge and open source issues, applying to our legal fellowship program can provide an immersive in-house experience with specific education and training in the areas of Internet law and free knowledge organizations. 

Description

The Foundation faces a myriad of legal issues ranging from complex copyright questions to international freedom of speech issues to mobile development to internal corporate compliance. Because of the wide array of legal issues, the fellows will be assigned challenging projects based on their particular interests and strengths. These projects range from researching various legal questions to drafting licensing agreements to developing internal and external policies. 

Each fellow will receive individualized projects that they will be expected to spearhead under the supervision and guidance of an attorney from the Legal Department.

Fellows will work closely with their supervising attorney - attending and participating in internal and external meetings, collaborating on projects, receiving feedback and support, and generally learning about the practical dimensions of practicing law in-house at a web-based company.

When the opportunity exists, the Legal Department will work with a fellow's university to facilitate earning academic credits and/or receiving funding for the fellow's time at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Requirements

• High energy for and commitment to the Wikimedia Foundation's free knowledge mission, including an interest in free culture issues, open source software, Creative Commons licensing, etc.
• A very good sense of humor and the ability to excel in a fast-paced, multitasking environment that demands fast turn-around.
• Intellectual curiosity and flexibility that makes them enjoy tackling difficult and ambiguous problems in creative ways.  Students with strong research backgrounds are preferred.
• Experience working with large online user communities (or at least the desire to). Students with experience with wikis or Wikimedia projects are preferred.
• The ability to flourish in a highly transparent and collaborative environment and work on a team with diverse demographic and cultural characteristics. Multilingual students (especially German, French, and/or Italian) are a plus!
• Excellent writing skills that can be adapted to communicate complex legal concepts to a large audience with varying (or no) backgrounds in law.  Students with experience and/or coursework in drafting agreements and/or policies are preferred.
• Completed coursework in some or all of the following areas of law: internet law, freedom of speech (domestic and international), intellectual property, contract drafting, international law, privacy, data security, and/or licensing.  While coursework in these areas is not required, students who have experience in these areas are heavily preferred.

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Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation seeks a highly collaborative and analytical audience & market impact professional to track the progress, trends and success of our strategies and campaigns. This work is critical to growing Wikipedia usage worldwide. In this role, you will work with the Foundation communications, product, advancement, community, partnership, and research teams to monitor and report on overall global growth and engagement initiatives. Lead implementation of the diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy by providing insights, thought leadership and guidance to leadership teams as well as operational teams. You will create high-level and detailed impact reporting and views for up-to-date sharing with partners, compiled from a variety of source reporting systems.

You are responsible for:

• Provide insights to the contributing factors in Wikipedia product usage. Across audiences, regions, languages, and cultures
• Know our audience inside and out across regions. Keep a close eye on current and upcoming current events, initiatives,  strategies and campaigns are currently in play, and accurately organize reporting for further impact analysis
• Compile and distribute up-to-date campaign and strategy impact performance reports. by working with key partners to understand reporting needs, impact metrics and initiatives to track; how to organize the dashboard and supporting reports; and how often to update the reports
• Partner with internal and external partners. By offering a qualitative and quantitative perspective, in conjunction with all involved parties within the external communications teams as well as other sources within the insights team
• A diversity, equity, and inclusion first approach. Ensure a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens is being considered to the best case possible by offering a qualitative and quantitative perspective on the matter. Gather diversity, equity, and inclusion related data sets as needed through internal and external means.

Skills and Experience:

• Campaign reporting experience
• Solid understanding of web analytics & tagging process
• Experience working with secure technical data feeds and transmissions 
• Demonstrated experience organizing and building reporting scorecards, dashboards and detailed report deep-linking. 
• Experience creating and implementing successful insights strategies with collaborative outcomes
• Excellent organizational and time management skills
• Sound judgment with proven ability to make objective data-based decisions  
• Analytical and innovative approach to aggregating and sharing data reports
• A deep love for Wikipedia/Wikimedia, the joy of discovery, and empowering the expansion of free knowledge 
• Experience working with people from diverse cultures and backgrounds 
• Passion for marketing work and engaging diverse international audiences 
• Embrace the idea that we don’t live in a perfect world and be willing to try new creative solutions to both old and new challenges
• Proficiency in SQL and Python is welcomed

Qualities that are important to us:

• Resilience—we work on new and interesting problems in a public and collaborative ways
• Being open, curious, and inquiring in our work
• Internal motivation and high standards
• Working together for outcomes, and being willing to change course
• Sharing a culture of constructive honest criticism and respect
• Natural inclination for team collaboration and for helping colleagues succeed