Wikimedia Foundation
Software Engineer III, Editing
Job Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Software Engineer III to develop and improve software supporting Wikipedia's user experience. The role involves fixing bugs, implementing new features, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance tools like VisualEditor and other Wikimedia projects. Candidates should have experience in JavaScript, PHP, and object-oriented development, with a strong focus on algorithms, data structures, and maintainable code. The position emphasizes open-source contribution, teamwork, and creating accessible, high-quality software in a distributed environment.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
Software Engineer III – Editing Team
Location: Candidates must be within the UTC-5 to UTC+1 time zones.
Core Working Hours: 3:00 PM to 5:30 PM UTC - 6:00 PM UTC.
Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join our team, reporting to product engineering management. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for engineering software that supports our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a distributed environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write open source code for collaborative experiences supporting a worldwide top-ten website (over a half a billion pages accessed per day), and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.
On the Editing Team, we support new and experienced volunteers working in 300+ languages with the tools they need to keep Wikipedia accurate and up to date. The team's main area of focus is the flagship VisualEditor, our industry-leading rich-text editing platform which we have been extending to serve new use cases (e.g. DiscussionTools to support on-wiki communication) and unlock new capabilities that lower the barriers people encounter when contributing to Wikipedia. The latest capability being Edit Check, an open-ended system designed to surface actionable pieces of feedback and suggestions that help volunteers improve the quality and integrity of the information Wikipedia offers.
You are responsible for:
- Improving the Wikipedia product experience by fixing bugs and implementing new functionality.
- Iterating on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, other teams, and community members.
- Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant code using Javascript and PHP.
- Building on top of the MediaWiki API ecosystem.
- Instrumenting components to monitor feature behavior and quality characteristics.
Skills and experience:
- 2–5 years related professional or open-source software engineering experience.
- Experience with object-oriented development using a scripting language (such as JavaScript, PHP, Python or Ruby). Most of our work is in JavaScript, PHP and CSS.
- Focused software engineering: you have experience of writing unit tests, and of structuring your work with version control.
- Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happens online, on chats, wikis, documents and tickets.
Qualities that are important to us:
- A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
- An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.A strong aptitude in algorithms and data structures is essential!
- A desire to write well-documented and maintainable code.
- The willingness to participate in technical discussions, proposing solutions to technical challenges, participating in code reviews and receiving feedback.
- An eagerness and curiosity to solve technical problems, trying things out and investigating issues, and supporting the work of others.
Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:
- Experience building a rich-text editor.
- Experience working with large, legacy codebases.
- A history of editing on Wikimedia projects.
- A history of open-source contribution.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or mathematics, or equivalent experience.
We’d love to hear from you — even if you don’t meet 100% of the criteria listed here. Most important is the aptitude to solve hard problems. Algorithms and data structures are extremely important in our products, so if this sounds interesting, come and talk to us!
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$88,975 to US$139,056 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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