Software Engineer (Trust & Safety Team) : Wikimedia

Job Description

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join the Trust and Safety Product team. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for building features to keep our communities safe from abuse, harassment, vandalism, and harmful or illicit content.  In this role, you will work in a fully-remote, geographically-distributed environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You will be writing open source code for collaborative experiences supporting over a billion users at a place that believes we’re all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.

The team is fully staffed with a Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Product Designer, Research Analyst, Data Analyst, Community Liaison, Test Engineers, and several Software Engineers, of course.

You will be working on, and improving, a codebase that has evolved over two decades. Much of our framework code was developed in-house, so you’ll need to be comfortable learning through research, reviewing patches, and reading documentation. PHP and JavaScript make up most of our code. Developers at the Foundation have autonomy and responsibility, and can have a large and immediate impact on the future of the site and the movement. Our world is vast and can be complicated, so we consider communication, enthusiasm, and eagerness to learn as important as certificates or degrees.

Skills and experience

3+ years of related professional or volunteering experience in software engineering roles, including frontend and backend development, with an emphasis on backend.

Experience with Object-Oriented development using a scripting language (such as PHP, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript). Most of our work is in PHP and JavaScript.

Experience converting design mockups into functional components, incorporating performance and accessibility into the features using well-documented and readable code.

Focused software engineering: writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and thoughtfully balancing tradeoffs.

Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happens online, on chats, wikis, documents and tickets.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have this

Experience with MediaWiki development or as a contributor to Wikimedia projects.

Experience with legacy codebases and/or experience in free/open source software development experience.

Experience with online community moderation, vandalism prevention and other Trust and Safety concepts and practices.

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$88,975  to US$ 139,056 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).