Summary

We are looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to support and develop the platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopedia to millions of people around the globe. Wikimedia’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team is principally responsible for ensuring our global top-15 website, our public-facing services, and underlying infrastructure is healthy and developing further in support of Wikimedia’s mission.

We apply the best software engineering practices in our operations, and we publish all of our documentation, code, and configuration as open source.

We are a globally distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment, and embrace new technologies. 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 websites, and you enjoy the idea of working in a remote-first role, we may just be the right place for you.

You are responsible for:

• Performing day-to-day operational/DevOps tasks on Wikimedia’s public facing infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting)
• Implementing and utilizing configuration management and deployment tools (Puppet, Kubernetes)
• Leading continuous improvement, by automating the installation, configuration and maintenance of services on our platform
• Assisting in the architectural design of new services and making them operate at scale
• Assisting in or leading incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system outages and alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
• Share our values and work in accordance with them

Skills and Experience:

• 8+ years experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team
• Experience with shell and any scripting languages used in an SRE context (Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, etc., we use primarily Python), and configuration management tools (Puppet, Ansible, etc.)
• Experience with C, C++, Golang or Rust
• Experience with distributed caching systems: including their underlying algorithms and how to optimize their performance.
• A thorough, protocol-level understanding of TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS
• Experience with package management on Linux systems (we use Debian)
• Comfortable with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack)
• Good Linux system level skills
• History of automating tasks and processes, identifying process gaps, and finding automation opportunities
• Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience with the use, maintenance and configuration of monitoring, metrics and logging infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Icinga/Nagios, etc.)
• Experience with high-performance HTTP(S) caching proxy software, such as Varnish, Envoy Proxy, Apache Traffic Server, Nginx or HAProxy
• Experience with Linux kernel tuning for high traffic loads
• Developing/contributing to Free and Open Source software, or being part of an open-source community
• Experience with defining cross-team SLOs and their implementation

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.