Staff Database Administrator

Summary

We’re hiring a Staff Database Administrator to support and protect the sum of all human knowledge shared by Wikipedia and its sister projects.Much of that knowledge is stored using MariaDB and therefore we’re looking for someone with a strong expertise in designing operating and optimizing relational (SQL) database infrastructure at large scale (MariaDB and other MySQL derivatives in particular) to support and scale the technology behind Wikipedia and its sister projects—some of the most visited websites on the internet.

Our work powers the daily experiences of hundreds of millions of users. You'll have the opportunity to learn take on new challenges and make a tangible difference on a global scale. As a Staff DBA you will be responsible for the health of our database systems and the products and services that depend on them - including their availability and performance. You’ll join the SRE Data Persistence team a small high-impact team responsible for Wikimedia’s production storage & retrieval systems and infrastructure part of a larger sub-department of Site Reliability Engineers in Product & Technology.

You are responsible for:

• Ensure the health and performance of Wikimedia’s production relational database systems and the structural integrity of its data.

• Deploy maintain and troubleshoot relational database systems in production development and staging environments

• Design implement manage and automate (multi-site) replication topologies

• Consult in the design of database schemas and queries and implement/oversee database schema changes in production

• Monitor debug and optimize database query performance

• Improve observability (alerting metrics monitoring) of database infrastructure

• Capacity and infrastructure planning including (on-prem) bare-metal hardware

• Contribute to the automation of common database management workflows

• Enable the reliable generation and timely restoration of database backups

• Maintain relationships with the MariaDB upstream projects/organizations and working with upstream developers on bug identification and resolution

• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation shared across the team - taking part in incident response diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure.

You share our values and guiding principles and work in accordance with them

Skills and Experience:

• Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database including complex replication topologies at scale

• Advanced proficiency in SQL and query/schema optimization

• Experience with debugging query performance and schema design

• Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations

• Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling

• Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)

• 6+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team

• Solid English language skills

• Ability to travel 1-2 times a year

• Ability to work independently in a fast paced environment as an effective part of a globally distributed team including ticket tracking systems and asynchronous communication tools

• B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Additionally we’d love it if you have:

• Proficiency at automation/programming/scripting (Python) and standard software development practices

• Experience with SRE practices and tooling including configuration management & orchestration strongly preferred.

• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM memcached/Redis) - MediaWiki experience is a definite plus

• Experience with other advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift Ceph Cassandra etc.) is a plus

• Strong track record of open source contributions is a major plus

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates 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 freely. We host Wikipedia and 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 donations 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.

As an equal opportunity employer the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race traits historically associated with race religion color national origin sex pregnancy or related medical conditions parental status sexual orientation gender identity gender expression age status as a protected veteran status as an individual with a disability genetic information or any other legally protected characteristics.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries * . Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive equitable and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$ 134133  to US$ 208254  with multiple individualized factors including cost of living in the location being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills experience and location.

*Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following countries: Australia Austria Bangladesh Belgium Brazil Canada Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Czech Republic Denmark Egypt Estonia Finland France Germany Ghana Greece India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Kenya Mexico Netherlands Nigeria Peru Poland Singapore South Africa Spain Sweden Switzerland Uganda United Kingdom United States of America and Uruguay.  Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR).

We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements.

All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability you may contact us at [email protected] or +1 (415) 839-6885.

More information

U.S. Benefits & Perks

Applicant Privacy Policy

Wikimedia Foundation

What does the Wikimedia Foundation do?

What makes Wikipedia different from social media platforms?

Our Projects

Our Tech Stack

News from across the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Blog

Wikimedia 2030