Staff Software Engineer

Location: Remote Work from Anywhere

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our team, reporting to the Engineering Manager, Cloud Services. Cloud Services curates environments that host tools and services utilized across Wikimedia projects. A significant portion of edit traffic on Wikipedia for example, is done by community developed tools we host!

Our team maintains Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Data as a Service products. The team works in partnership (our puppet repo is public! And yes, you can contribute to it!) with the larger Wikimedia volunteer community to manage these environments. Candidates should be comfortable communicating in public and asynchronous ways with volunteers and developers from around the world.

You’ll work remotely with a full-time distributed team, with members spread between Europe and North America, and need to overlap (UTC-4 to UTC+2) working hours. Some examples of the type of work you’ll be doing include:

• Expanding the capabilities of our tool forge platform
• Expanding and refining our storage offerings, like NFS
• Scaling our team via automation
• Providing a curated Jupyter notebook environment for data analysis and queries of Wikimedia data
• Upgrading, customizing, and adding new services to Openstack

And the backlog has even more details!

You are responsible for:

• Developing new web services for our technical community, like Quarry
• Aiding in the rollout and expansion of our PaaS, Toolforge, including CI/CD and buildpacks
• Helping standardize our offerings, including storage
• Performing day-to-day operational tasks on Wikimedia’s Cloud Services infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting). Develop and support automation tools and processes in support of these tasks.
• Participating in on-call rotation and support in a 24×7 environment

Skills and Experience:

• Experience in designing and operating a PaaS in production environments
• Comfortable working and thriving within a Linux ecosystem
• Software development skills in at least one of the following languages: Python, Go, JavaScript, and/or Ruby
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or related field or equivalent in related work experience.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Share our values, appreciate our code of conduct, support our team norms, and work in accordance with all three
• Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
• Support of our users (volunteer and staff developers) using our service offerings
• Passionate about the value of learning and growing together

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Utilized configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, and SaltStack
• Used Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, or similar container orchestration platforms
• Operated an elastic computing environment such as OpenStack or Cloudstack
• Operated Open Source database systems like MySQL and Postgres
• Experience in serverless computing environments
• Linux systems troubleshooting and debugging skills
• Interest in open source software projects and communities

U.S. 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 22 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

*Please note that for remote roles located outside of the U.S., we defer to our PEO to ensure alignment with local labor laws.