Senior Site Reliability Engineer (ServiceOps)

at Wikimedia Foundation
Location Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, United Republic of
Date Posted November 5, 2022
Category IT / Information Technology
Management
NGO
Job Type Contract
Currency TZS

Description

Summary

Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our ServiceOps SRE team, where we take care of the infrastructure that runs wikipedia.org and other Wikimedia Foundation projects.

The SRE team at Wikimedia is a distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment and embrace new technologies. The SRE ServiceOps team focuses on the application layer of our complex infrastructure as well as our developer-facing services. Our stack includes MediaWiki instances running on bare metal, surrounding microservices running on our own Kubernetes platform, an in-house designed deployment pipeline and open source collaboration software (Gerrit, Gitlab and Phabricator). We ❤️ automation, and we automate as much as we can using primarily Python, Puppet, and Spicerack (https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-software-spicerack). We work in the open and document our work on our internal task management system and our technical wiki (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org). Feel free to check out our activities there!

As a senior engineer in the SRE ServiceOps team you will be involved in designing and running the infrastructure and services that form the base of Wikimedia Foundation’s projects, including, but not limited to: Kubernetes clusters, application servers, code collaboration infrastructure, and  other developer-facing services. You will participate in incident response and be oncall. This role requires frequent work with other members of the SRE team to maintain and improve our systems, as well as interacting with people not in SRE, like Security, Release and Software Engineers, together striving to move our projects and technologies forward.

We use more technologies than we can list here and are interested in your experience even if it doesn’t exactly match the keywords above / below. If you find what we do interesting and enjoy the idea of working with a globally distributed team that runs a Top-15 website, we may be what you’re looking for!

You are responsible for:

  • Design, implementation and maintenance of public facing infrastructure and services
  • Use of configuration management and deployment tools
  • Architectural design and operation at scale
  • Monitoring of systems and services, optimization of performance and resource utilization
  • Common operating system level tasks such as logging and backup / restore
  • Cookbook / runbook implementation for common maintenance actions
  • Incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts
  • Automation and streamlining of tasks as well as identifying process gaps
  • Collaborating with a global and asynchronously communicating team (don’t worry if you have never worked remotely, we’ll help you get used to it)
  • Mentoring peers in your areas of technical and operational strength

Skills and Experience:

  • 5+ years experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role
  • Experience with operating highly available infrastructure
  • Experience with running applications and services at scale
  • Proficient with shell and a programming language used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Ruby, etc.)
  • Comfortable with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, TerraForm etc.)
  • Communicative technical English

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

  • Experience implementing containerization solutions (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Experience administering code collaboration software (Gitlab, Gerrit)
  • Experience with package management for operating systems (Debian, etc)
  • We are avid supporters (and users) of open source software; history of contributing to Open Source projects is valued
  • Familiarity with RFC 2549
  • Prior participation in the Wikimedia movement

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.