Director of Engineering: MediaWiki

Job Description

The Director of Engineering, MediaWiki is accountable for the MediaWiki Engineering Group in the Wikimedia Foundation and is an active participant in the strategic decision making for the Product and Technology department and across the Wikimedia movement. The teams in this group build, maintain, and improve upon MediaWiki, the software platform that powers Wikipedia and its sister projects, used by hundreds of millions of people each month. MediaWiki has been built to enable the creation, moderation, storage, discovery and consumption of open content in different languages and at scale. As free and open source software, MediaWiki is also used by many other projects and sites.The MediaWiki Engineering group includes the MediaWiki Interfaces, MediaWiki Platform, and Content Transform team. The monthly MediaWiki Insights have more information on the kind of challenges the team undertakes.This role involves managing an engineering organization of about 25 including some very experienced Principal engineers and managers.

The role reports to the Senior Director of Engineering and shares responsibility with the Director of Product for MediaWiki to iterate and execute on a holistic strategy for MediaWiki in collaboration with other engineering teams, product management, and the volunteer technical contributor community. The role will require developing a deep understanding of the community and its needs.

Skills and Experience:

Experience leading teams that manage software engineering lifecycle processes and services in an organization with 100+ software engineers.

Experience leading or managing a backend platform organization.

Experience managing organizational interaction with a community of volunteer technical contributors.

Experience building and leading diverse, multi-national and remote-first teams.

Proven success at all stages of the engineering process and product lifecycle, leading to significant, measurable impact.

Experience with managing managers.

Ability to travel up to 2-3 times a year.

Ability to work flexible hours with an organization spread across several time zones.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience contributing to or managing open source projects and communities, or experience with open governance (IETF, W3C, etc.).
• Familiarity with MediaWiki.
• Experience working with (high-traffic) systems powered by large, monolithic code bases.
• Experience editing Wikipedia or contributing to other wiki projects.
• Experience working with internationally distributed teams or organizations.

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$ 172,976  to US$ 269,298 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 Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States of America and Uruguay.  Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR).