Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join its Platform Engineering Team. This role will directly support our application platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopædia to millions of people around the globe. Wikipedia and its sister projects are powered strictly by Free and Open Source software, with MediaWiki at its core, surrounded by an ecosystem of microservices in PHP, NodeJS, Python, and Go.

We are a distributed, remote and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment, and embrace new technologies. The Platform Engineering team is responsible for core infrastructure, systems, services and platforms that power Wikimedia sites. Our work is focused on enabling the work of teams  in all parts of the Foundation. Right now we are building the API, Data and Metrics Platforms to serve the needs of teams from feature development through research to analytics and other platforms.

The candidate for this role will operate as an embedded SRE within the team working in close cooperation with both the members of the Platform Engineering team and the larger SRE organisation. Our team communicates solely in English, as a consequence you will need to be comfortable discussing and solving technical problems in English.

If you find what we do interesting, if you are up to the challenge of improving the reliability and delivery of one of the Internet’s top 10 websites, and you enjoy the idea of working with a globally distributed team, you might be just the person we need. Come as you are!

Your responsibilities include:

• Sharing our values and working in accordance with them
• Ensuring smooth and reliable operation of the Platform Engineering team’s ecosystem of microservices, systems and infrastructure (including dealing with our main MediaWiki installations). We work regularly with Cassandra (in particular), Redis, Envoy, MariaDB/MySQL and other platforms.
• Investigating performance of our Debian Linux fleet, deep diving into profiling, UNIX fundamentals and doing shell scripting.
• Performing platform transformations and migrations towards modernised infrastructure (bare metal deployments to Kubernetes clusters, active/active multi-data center support, etc.)
• Bringing your creativity to improve our current infrastructure and introduce new automation where needed
• Participating in early design and review of projects, guiding appropriate technology approaches
• Mentoring and supporting other engineers on the Platform team as regards infrastructure and beyond
• Supporting the team in deploying new features and fixes
• Troubleshooting, debugging and following up on emerging issues in our application stack and services with other teams at the Foundation
• Interfacing between the Platform Engineering Team and the WMF’s SRE team
• Implementing and utilising configuration management, orchestration and deployment tools (Puppet, Kubernetes)
• Assisting in the architectural design of new services and making them operate at scale
• Monitoring of systems, services and service clusters, optimisation of performance and resource utilisation
• Incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure

Skills and Experience:

• Demonstrable experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team
• Ability to communicate well across different teams, roles and contexts
• Experience in supporting complex web applications running highly available and high traffic infrastructure based on Linux
• Development experience in at least one language - PHP, Nodejs, Python or Go are examples of what we mostly work with.
• Comfortable with configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, etc.), and modern observability infrastructure (monitoring, metrics and logging)

Qualities that are important to us:

• Track record of open source contributions is highly appreciated
• Familiarity with core distributed systems concepts
• Familiarity with modern distributed container cluster management systems (Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, …)

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.