Senior Software Engineer - Performance

Senior Software Engineer

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an engineer with a strong capacity to cultivate and manage interpersonal relationships to join its Performance Team. This role will directly support our application platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopedia to millions of people around the globe. We expect our developers to be proactive and collaborative partners with product and engineering managers. 

As part of a highly distributed, worldwide, and diverse organization, you will collaborate with other teams through an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication. A big part of our work is devoted to collecting and analyzing site performance data to ensure that we have a holistic and accurate understanding of what users experience when they access Wikimedia sites. You can discover our dashboards by visiting the Wikimedia Performance portal. 

Our team communicates solely in English, as a consequence, you will need to be comfortable discussing and solving technical problems in English.

If you are able to provide collaborative solutions for complex problems and enjoy the idea of interacting with multiple stakeholders in an empathetic manner, you might be just the person we need. 

You are responsible for:

• Sharing our values and working in accordance with them
• Understand, propose and pursue success metrics 
• Being impact driven and able to align with the Foundation’s priorities
• Work together with management to define high-level timelines, solve blockers and avoid delays
• Being open and able to ask for help from your teammates and learn from your own and other’s mistakes
• Mentoring and supporting other engineers in the Foundation
• Being able to change your opinion and compromise when presented with new evidence or product input.
• Is able to propose solutions considering a complex array of inputs and needs

Skills and Experience:

• Ability to give and receive feedback in a constructive and honest manner. 
• Familiarity with observability tools (such as Prometheus, or Logstash)
• Basic knowledge about main performance metrics and tests
• Ability to communicate well across different teams, roles, and contexts
• 5+ years of development experience in at least one language - PHP, python, Nodejs
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or the equivalent in work related experience

Qualities that are important to us:

• Track record of open source contributions is highly appreciated
• Familiarity with core distributed systems concepts
• Familiarity with monitoring synthetic measurements (WebPageTest, WebPageReplay, Browsertime) and Real User Monitoring (direct collection, stored in Prometheus/Graphite)
• Familiarity with our backend stack: PHP, MariaDB, Varnish

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.

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.

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