Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the team supporting the Wikidata Platform — the structured data backbone of Wikimedia projects and a key part of the global open knowledge ecosystem. You’ll help scale and sustain the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and related platform services that power tools, features, communities, and research efforts across Wikimedia projects and beyond.
This role combines backend engineering and operations ownership. You’ll implement high-scale, production-grade services while ensuring performance, reliability, and maintainability. Working closely with the technical and product leads, you’ll contribute to shaping the future of how the world queries and interacts with structured, linked data.
What You’ll Do
- Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs that power Wikidata’s query infrastructure
- Improve reliability, observability, and automation of the Wikidata Query Service and data pipelines
- Integrate Wikidata Platform services with other systems and data sources across Wikimedia
- Collaborate with SRE, data engineers, and product teams to ensure stability and scalability under growing usage
- Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents, and proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks
- Support platform migrations and system upgrades (e.g., triple stores, streaming ingestion)
- Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD workflows, and service instrumentation
- Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical planning
- Document systems and share knowledge with team members and Wikimedia’s broader technical community
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 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$ 116,633 to US$ 181,243 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.
Skills and Experience We’re Looking For
- 5+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms
- Deep understanding of database and/or knowledge graph representation technologies and standards
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or other systems languages. Ability to set up, scale, and investigate systems is more important than expertise in a particular language.
- Experience building and operating production-grade services with SLOs - good appreciation of scalability, performance, reliability and other non-functionals
- Familiarity with modern observability tools (metrics, logging, tracing)
- Experience in data processing systems such as graph databases, search indexes, or data processing pipelines
- Ability to work collaboratively across disciplines and communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences
- A commitment to learning, resilience, and contributing to a mission-driven engineering culture
Nice to Have
- Experience working with knowledge graphs or RDF/SPARQL
- Familiarity with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink)
- Comfort with CI/CD pipelines and containerization tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience in open source or open knowledge communities
- Familiarity with Wikimedia technologies, Wikidata, or MediaWiki
