Wikimedia Foundation - Staff Software Engineer
Requirements
• Extensive experience as a senior or Staff-level software engineer working on platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-adjacent systems. • Strong architectural skills across APIs, backend services, and user-facing workflows. • Experience designing and building developer platforms: build systems, deployment pipelines, lifecycle tooling, or similar. • Ability to work effectively across roles—partnering with SREs, product, developer advocates, and volunteer contributors. • Comfort operating in open, distributed, and asynchronous environments. • Experience contributing to or leading open-source projects. • Familiarity with Toolforge, Wikimedia Cloud Services, or large-scale contributor platforms. • A strong interest in improving developer experience and lowering barriers to entry for technical contributors. • 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.
Benefits
• Today, Toolforge has strong infrastructure foundations but lacks Staff-level software engineering leadership focused on developer workflows, lifecycle tooling, and product experience. This role fills that gap. • As a Staff Software Engineer, you will shape how contributors interact with Toolforge end-to-end—reducing friction, improving reliability, and setting technical direction for a multi-year platform strategy. • You’ll be responsible for: • Providing Staff-level technical leadership for the software and product experience layer of Toolforge. • Designing and building the platform software and user-facing workflows used to create, deploy, debug, and maintain tools. • Leading the redesign of Toolforge’s tool creation and maintenance UI • Defining and implementing golden paths for common workloads such as Bots, Web tools and Data-processing tools • Partnering closely with SREs to ensure platform software integrates cleanly with production infrastructure and operational practices. • Acting as a technical multiplier for the team by mentoring engineers, raising engineering standards, and guiding architectural decisions. • Applicant Privacy Policy • Wikimedia Foundation • What does the Wikimedia Foundation do? • What makes Wikipedia different from social media platforms? • News from across the Wikimedia movement
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