Wikimedia Foundation

Senior Software Engineer

Wikimedia Foundation

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🇺🇸 United States

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Salary

💰 $141,352 - $175,725 per year

Job Level

Senior

Tech Stack

Distributed SystemsDockerJavaKafkaKubernetesOpen Source

About the role

  • Help scale and sustain the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and related platform services
  • Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs that power Wikidata’s query infrastructure
  • Improve reliability, observability, and automation of the Wikidata Query Service and data pipelines
  • Collaborate with SRE, data engineers, and product teams to ensure stability and scalability under growing usage
  • Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents, and proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks
  • Support platform migrations and system upgrades (e.g., triple stores, streaming ingestion)
  • Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD workflows, and service instrumentation
  • Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical planning
  • Document systems and share knowledge with team members and Wikimedia’s broader technical community
  • Work closely with technical and product leads to shape future of how the world queries and interacts with structured, linked data; ensure performance, reliability, and maintainability

Requirements

  • 5+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms
  • Deep understanding of database and knowledge graph representation technologies and standards
  • Proficiency in Java, C++, or other systems languages; ability to set up, scale, and investigate systems is more important than expertise in a particular language
  • Experience building and operating production-grade services with SLOs
  • Familiarity with modern observability tools (metrics, logging, tracing)
  • Understanding of graph databases, search indexes, or data processing pipelines
  • Ability to work collaboratively across disciplines and communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences
  • A commitment to learning, resilience, and contributing to a mission-driven engineering culture
  • Working hours must overlap with UTC+1 to UTC-5 (team overlapping hours 14:00 UTC to 17:00 UTC)
  • Nice to have: Experience working with knowledge graphs or RDF/SPARQL
  • Nice to have: Familiarity with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink)
  • Nice to have: Comfort with CI/CD pipelines and containerization tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Nice to have: Experience in open source or open knowledge communities
  • Nice to have: Familiarity with Wikimedia technologies, Wikidata, or MediaWiki