Engineer, Services at Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. () (allows remote)

Wikipedia is where the world turns to understand almost any topic — The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects with a small staff. We are looking for a great engineer who wants to modernize the infrastructure underlying Wikipedia and make it scalable and sustainable. If this excites you we welcome you to join us.

Description

Contribute to a dedicated team that develops and evolves the software infrastructure powering the Wikimedia projects
Gather requirements and architect software solutions supporting the Foundation’s strategic direction
Create modular, highly-scalable, distributed services
Assist and mentor other teams in integrating their projects with the core software platform
Build automated tests and thorough monitoring for the components being developed, and help package them for internal and third-party distribution.
Change the world for more than half a billion people every month ;)

Example Projects

Here are some of the projects you would be contributing to:

Distributed storage component. Our datasets include tens of terabytes of content spread across multiple data centres, which can be quite challenging and time-consuming when developing features and products. Our team is tasked with designing and implementing a PaaS-like robust, distributed storage component that can easily be leveraged to speed up new user-facing features and products.
Session management service. Privacy is of great concern to Wikipedia’s communities. By isolating session management into a separate service, we are minimising the attack surface and increasing the security of our systems.
Event propagation and dependency tracking. While the number of direct edits is rather small, they can cause updates to several million pages at once. Hence, our infrastructure must be able to reliably update the databases and HTML representations and purge content from the caches at large scale.

Requirements

You have experience building large-scale server applications.
- You think about clusters, caching and latencies
- You are familiar with issues in large-scale systems and are eager to learn new technology
You are familiar with a diverse set of programming languages and have a solid understanding of core engineering concepts:
- Unix process and concurrency models
- Server application deployment and infrastructure automation
- Relational & distributed databases (e.g. MySQL, Cassandra, Riak, HBase, DynamoDB)
- Principles of fault tolerance and security
With freedom comes responsibility; you direct your own work and are proactive in seeking input
You have a scientific mindset and empirically test your hypotheses
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Pluses

Familiarity with Node.js
Experience with contributing to open source software and free culture
Self-organised, with experience in working in a geographically-distributed environment
You know what it means to be a volunteer or to coordinate the work of volunteers
Big ups if you are a contributor to Wikipedia and/or its sister projects

Show us your stuff! If you have any existing open source software that you've developed (these could be your own software or patches to other packages), please share the URLs for the source. Links to GitHub, etc. are exceptionally useful.

The Wikimedia Foundation is...

...the nonprofit organization that supports 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, free of interference. We host 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 financial support 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.

The Wikimedia Foundation is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply.

Benefits & Perks *

Fully paid medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and their eligible families (yes, fully paid premiums!)
The Wellness Program provides reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, baby sitting, continuing education and much more
The 401(k) retirement plan offers matched contributions at 4% of annual salary
Flexible and generous time off - vacation, sick and volunteer days, plus 19 paid holidays - including the last week of the year.
Family friendly! 100% paid new parent leave for seven weeks plus an additional five weeks for pregnancy, flexible options to phase back in after leave, fully equipped lactation room.
For those emergency moments - long and short term disability, life insurance (2x salary) and an employee assistance program
Pre-tax savings plans for health care, child care, elder care, public transportation and parking expenses
Telecommuting and flexible work schedules available
Appropriate fuel for thinking and coding (aka, a pantry full of treats) and monthly massages to help staff relax
Great colleagues - diverse staff and contractors speaking dozens of languages from around the world, fantastic intellectual discourse, mission-driven and intensely passionate people