Senior Software Engineer, Wikidata Platform

Wikimedia Foundation

full-time

Posted on: 9/18/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States

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💰 $141,352 - $175,725 per year

Senior

Distributed SystemsDockerJavaKafkaKubernetesOpen Source

About the role

Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs that power Wikidata’s query infrastructure.
Improve reliability, observability, and automation of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) 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.

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.
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.
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.