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Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Cloud Services 🔥


Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Cloud Services

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our team, reporting to the Engineering Manager, Cloud Services. Cloud Services [1] curates environments that host tools and services utilized across Wikimedia projects. A significant portion of edit traffic on Wikipedia for example, is done by community developed tools we host! 

Our team maintains Infrastructure as a Service [2], Platform as a Service [3], and Data as a Service [4] products. The team works in partnership (our puppet repo is public! And yes, you can contribute to it! [5]) with the larger Wikimedia volunteer community to manage these environments.  Candidates should be comfortable communicating in public and asynchronous ways with volunteers and developers from around the world.

You’ll work remotely with a full-time distributed team, with members spread between Europe and North America, and need to overlap (UTC-5 to UTC+1) working hours.  Some examples of the type of work you’ll be doing include:

  • Expanding the capabilities of our toolforge platform [6]
  • Expanding and refining our storage offerings, like NFS [7]
  • Scaling our team via automation [8]
  • Providing a curated Jupyter notebook environment [9] for data analysis and queries of Wikimedia data
  • Upgrading, customizing, and adding new services [10] to Openstack

And the backlog [11] has even more details!

You are responsible for:

  • Developing new webservices for our technical community, like Quarry [12] and PAWS [13]
  • Aiding in the rollout and expansion of our PaaS, Toolforge, including CI/CD and buildpacks
  • Helping standardize our offerings, including storage
  • Performing day-to-day operational tasks on Wikimedia’s Cloud Services infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting). Develop and support automation tools and processes in support of these tasks.
  • Participating in on-call rotation and support in a 24x7 environment

Skills and Experience:

  • Comfortable working and thriving within a Linux ecosystem
  • Software development skills in at least one of the following languages: Python, Go, Javascript, and/or Ruby
  • B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or related field or equivalent in related work experience.

Qualities that are important to us:

  • Share our values [14], appreciate our code of conduct [15], support our team norms [16], and work in accordance with all three
  • Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
  • Support of our users (volunteer and staff developers) using our service offerings
  • Passionate about the value of learning and growing together

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

  • Utilized configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, and SaltStack
  • Used Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, or similar container orchestration platforms
  • Operated an elastic computing environment such as OpenStack or Cloudstack
  • Experience in serverless computing environments
  • Linux systems troubleshooting and debugging skills
  • Interest in open source software projects and communities

The Wikimedia Foundation is... 

...the nonprofit organization that hosts and 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, free of interference. We host 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 financial support 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.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or (415) 839-6885.

U.S. Benefits & Perks*

  • Fully paid medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and their eligible families (yes, fully paid premiums!)
  • The Wellness Program provides reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, baby sitting, continuing education and much more
  • The 401(k) retirement plan offers matched contributions at 4% of annual salary
  • Flexible and generous time off - vacation, sick and volunteer days, plus 22 paid holidays - including the last week of the year.
  • Family friendly! 100% paid new parent leave for seven weeks plus an additional five weeks for pregnancy, flexible options to phase back in after leave, fully equipped lactation room.
  • For those emergency moments - long and short term disability, life insurance (2x salary) and an employee assistance program
  • Pre-tax savings plans for health care, child care, elder care, public transportation and parking expenses
  • Telecommuting and flexible work schedules available
  • Appropriate fuel for thinking and coding (aka, a pantry full of treats) and monthly massages to help staff relax
  • Great colleagues - diverse staff and contractors speaking dozens of languages from around the world, fantastic intellectual discourse, mission-driven and intensely passionate people

*Please note that for remote roles located outside of the U.S., we defer to our PEO to ensure alignment with local labor laws.

More information

Wikimedia Foundation [17]
Blog [18]
Wikimedia 2030 [19]
Wikimedia Medium Term Plan [20]
Our Commitment to Equity [21]
This is Wikimedia Foundation [22] 
Facts Matter [23]
Our Projects [24]
Our Tech Stack [25]


  1. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Cloud_Services_Introduction
  2. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Cloud_VPS
  3. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge
  4. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Data_Services
  5. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2011/09/19/ever-wondered-how-the-wikimedia-servers-are-configured/
  6. https://toolforge.org
  7. https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2021/10/19/iterating-on-how-we-do-nfs-at-wikimedia-cloud-services/
  8. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spicerack
  9. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/PAWS
  10. https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2021/07/19/introducing-database-as-a-service-on-cloud-vps/
  11. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/832/
  12. https://quarry.wmcloud.org/
  13. https://paws.wmcloud.org/
  14. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/values/
  15. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct
  16. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Engagement/Team_Social_Norms
  17. https://wikimediafoundation.org/
  18. https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/
  19. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017
  20. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019
  21. https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/we-stand-for-racial-justice-49c31afbabca
  22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQzZI0l3IOw
  23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ4ba28-oGs
  24. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects
  25. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers#System_architecture

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