Software Engineer, Wikidata Platform
Wikimedia FoundationBase Salary
$95k - $149k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs supporting 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.
- Develop features that improve platform stability and scalability under growing usage.
- 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, service instrumentation, code reviews, design discussions, and technical documentation.
Requirements
- At least two years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms.
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or another systems programming language, with the ability to set up, scale, and investigate systems.
- Experience building and operating production-grade services with attention to scalability, performance, reliability, and SLOs.
- Understanding of database and/or knowledge graph representation technologies.
- Familiarity with observability tools and data-processing technologies such as graph databases, search indexes, or data-processing pipelines.
- Ability to collaborate across disciplines and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience with knowledge graphs or RDF/SPARQL is preferred.
- Familiarity with streaming systems such as Kafka or Flink is preferred.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and containerization tools such as Docker or Kubernetes is preferred.
- Experience in open source or open knowledge communities and familiarity with Wikimedia, Wikidata, or MediaWiki are preferred.
Benefits
- Fully remote role with working-hour overlap between UTC+1 and UTC-5, including team overlap from 14:00 to 17:00 UTC.
- Remote-first organization with staff and contractors based in more than 40 countries.
- Hiring is available only in the listed eligible U.S. states, territories, and countries.
- Non-U.S. employees are hired through a local Employer of Record and must have current work authorization.
- U.S. benefits and perks are provided.
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.