Senior Frontend Engineer, Abstract Wikipedia

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Frontend Engineer to participate in our work on Abstract Wikipedia, a project that aims to improve knowledge equity by enabling more people to share more knowledge in more languages.

We’re committed to making knowledge available to everyone globally. This is an opportunity to do good while building a system to support new technology at the intersection of collaborative systems, natural language generation, and computational linguistics.

Our geographically-distributed team is writing the code to build Wikifunctions, a new technology to enable a collaboratively edited catalog of computer functions that will power Abstract Wikipedia. Working in the open alongside our community is the norm.

The Wikimedia Foundation values diversity and recognizes that employees from a broad range of perspectives are essential to creating a knowledge source that benefits everyone. We are committed to inclusion, diversifying tech, and advocating for diversity in our employees, their experiences, and the people we serve.

Our teams build products that enable our communities to achieve our Vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.  

You will be responsible for:

• Designing and building robust and scalable systems, together with a multidisciplinary team, to support knowledge equity.
• Becoming familiar with a new codebase and how it interacts with a large, mature codebase to drive engineering solutions.
• Supporting fellow engineers through code reviews, transferring knowledge, collaborating on projects, and writing documentation.

Requirements:

• Familiarity with modern JavaScript frameworks and libraries (e.g., Vue.js, React).
• Minimum of 3-5 years of work experience in software development.
• An interest in and ability to work with a distributed team (which requires good asynchronous written communication skills and good verbal communication skills in English).
• Ability to interact effectively and develop productive working relationships with management, peers, and communities, including non-technical staff.
• Must be comfortable with evolving requirements and priorities in a dynamic environment.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Experience with large-scale, global developer ecosystems.
• Alignment with our mission and values.
• Resilience—we work on new and interesting problems in public and collaboratively.
• Working together for outcomes and being willing to change course.
• Sharing a culture of constructive criticism and respect.

Additionally, we would love it if you have:

• Experience with the Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons communities, or other collaborative enterprises.
• Familiarity with MediaWiki.
• Experience in developing systems using structured content, knowledge graphs, or taxonomies.
• Experience developing Web-scale deployments in PHP.
• Experience with open source development methodologies and open source community.
• An interest in natural language generation and/or computational linguistics.