Senior Software Engineer, Wikidata Platform
Wikimedia FoundationBase Salary
$117k - $181k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs powering Wikidata’s query infrastructure.
- Improve the reliability, observability, and automation of the Wikidata Query Service and data pipelines.
- Integrate Wikidata Platform services with Wikimedia systems and external data sources.
- Collaborate with SRE, data engineering, and product teams to support stability and scalability.
- Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents, and resolve performance bottlenecks.
- Support platform migrations and system upgrades, including triple stores and streaming ingestion.
- Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD workflows, and service instrumentation.
- Participate in code reviews, design discussions, technical planning, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms.
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or another systems language, with the ability to set up, scale, and investigate systems.
- Experience building and operating production-grade services with service-level objectives and strong scalability, performance, and reliability requirements.
- Deep understanding of database and/or knowledge graph representation technologies and standards.
- Familiarity with observability practices involving metrics, logging, and tracing.
- Experience with graph databases, search indexes, or data processing pipelines.
- Ability to collaborate across disciplines and communicate with technical and non-technical audiences.
- Preferred experience with knowledge graphs, RDF, SPARQL, streaming data systems such as Kafka or Flink, CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, open source or open knowledge communities, Wikimedia technologies, Wikidata, or MediaWiki.
Benefits
- Fully remote position with working-hour overlap between UTC+1 and UTC-5, including team overlap from 14:00 to 17:00 UTC.
- Applicants must be located in an eligible U.S. state, territory, or listed country; non-U.S. employees are hired through a local Employer of Record and require current work authorization.
- U.S. annual pay range is US$116,633 to US$181,243, adjusted by location and individualized factors.
- U.S. benefits and perks are provided, with further details available through the Wikimedia Foundation benefits information.
Tech Stack
About Wikimedia Foundation
We are the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. We host a technology infrastructure that makes possible billions of monthly visits to Wikipedia. Since 2003, we have supported the hundreds of thousands of volunteer editors who edit, expand, and curate the Wikimedia projects. We equip these volunteers with the most up-to-date tools, ensure connections to Wikipedia are fast, safe, and private, and develop new technology and products to meet the demands of our readers and editors. We provide individuals and organizations around the world with funding to increase the knowledge on Wikipedia. We also undertake legal and advocacy efforts to protect people’s right to free knowledge. We are 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 $11. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. We are a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California.