Wikimedia Foundation
Site Reliability Engineering Manager
Job Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an Engineering Manager for their Site Reliability Engineering team. The role involves managing distributed teams, providing technical guidance, and coordinating complex projects aimed at maintaining Wikimedia's infrastructure. Candidates should have experience in team management, systems troubleshooting, and cloud technologies, along with strong communication skills. The position emphasizes leadership, strategic planning, incident response, and collaboration within a globally distributed environment.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for an Engineering Manager to join our SRE team, reporting to the Director of Site Reliability Engineering. As Engineering Manager, you will be responsible for supporting the engineers developing our infrastructure and supporting the services that depend on it, used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
You will be responsible for:
- Managing one to two globally distributed teams within Wikimedia’s Site Reliability Engineering organization
- Providing guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure the team's effectiveness and growth
- Working with team members to set individual performance goals, and supporting them in meeting and evolving their goals and career path
- Recruiting, hiring, and helping onboard new team members
- Triaging incoming workload, maintaining focus on priorities, and setting realistic expectations for both peers and team members
- Coordinating and communicating with other members of the Wikimedia product & engineering teams on relevant projects, executing complex projects and contributing to the organizational strategy
- Continuously developing the roadmap of the team in alignment with other SRE and Product & Technology teams, and helping to draft and execute the team’s annual and quarterly plans
- Project managing new and existing initiatives
- Leading the definition, refinement, and execution of the processes through which the team manages and performs work
- Leading incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system alerts and outages across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
- Be part of 24/7 on-call rotation to handle escalations and provide support for teams to resolve issues
- Facilitating the definition and establishment of Service Level Indicators and Objectives with service owners and stakeholders
Skills and experience:
- Prior experience managing teams
- Prior hands-on experience with software or reliability engineering (within the last 3 years preferred)
- Ability to analyze complex systems, troubleshoot issues, and devise effective solutions under pressure
- Proficiency in project management methodologies to effectively plan, execute, and track new and existing initiatives
- Strong understanding of cloud computing, networking, Linux systems administration, containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) to be able to provide technical support to the team
- Aptitude for automation and streamlining of tasks
- Communicate effectively in both spoken and written English
- Ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
- Ability to travel several times a year for occasional in-person meetings
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or the equivalent in related work experience
Qualities that are important to us:
- Commitment to the mission of the organization, our values and guiding principles
- Ability to disagree in a respectful manner and yet work towards a solution even when you disagree
- Good at asynchronous communication
- Solutions-focused. The Wikimedia ecosystem is complex, resources are limited, and our guiding principles are ambitious. We want you to work to find solutions embracing these factors.
- Self motivated with an ability to navigate through ambiguity and bring a project to completion with limited directions
- Curiosity and commitment to learn
Additionally, we’d love it if you have:
- Experience working in a distributed, largely remote environment
- Experience contributing to open source projects
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$132,439 to US$208,378 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
What does the Wikimedia Foundation do?
What makes Wikipedia different from social media platforms?
News from across the Wikimedia movement
Wikimedia Foundation
A nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, promoting open access to information.
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