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Job Description
Join the Wikimedia Foundation's Editing Team to contribute to the core editing experience of Wikipedia, focusing on the VisualEditor and tools like Edit Check. This role involves improving the product through feature development, bug fixes, and collaboration, directly impacting a top-ten global website supporting knowledge equity and open access.
Key Information
- Location Model: Remote
- Location Details: Candidates must be within the UTC-5 to UTC+2 time zones.
- Salary Range: N/A
- Years Experience Min: 2+ years
- Employment Type: Permanent
- Company Industry: Non-profit / Open Source
- Visa Sponsorship: N/A
- Relocation Assistance: N/A
- Working Hours: Core hours 3:00 PM - 5:30 PM UTC, potential overlap until 6:00 PM UTC.
Technical Stack
- Core (Must-Have):
- JavaScript
- PHP
- CSS
- MediaWiki API ecosystem
- Nice-to-Have:
- N/A
Role & Responsibilities
- Key Responsibilities:
- Improve Wikipedia product experience through bug fixes and new features.
- Iterate on features via collaboration with cross-functional teams and community.
- Write multilingual, accessible, and performant code.
- Build upon the MediaWiki API ecosystem.
- Instrument components for monitoring feature behavior and quality.
- Must-Have Qualifications:
- 2–5 years professional or open-source software engineering experience.
- Experience with object-oriented development using scripting languages (JavaScript, PHP, Python, or Ruby).
- Experience with unit testing and version control.
- Strong written communication skills for online collaboration.
- Strong aptitude in algorithms and data structures.
- Nice-to-Have Qualifications:
- Experience building a rich-text editor.
- Experience working with large, legacy codebases.
- History of editing on Wikimedia projects or open-source contribution.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or mathematics, or equivalent experience.
Company & Culture
- Benefits Highlights:
- N/A
- Potential Red Flags / Things to Note:
- Specific core working hours window required.
- Compensation range not specified.
- Company Culture Snippets:
- Distributed team environment.
- Values teamwork and consensus-oriented approach.
- Emphasis on good work-life balance.
- Desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
- Emphasis on clear communication (sync and async).
Software Engineer III – Editing Team
Location: Candidates must be within the UTC-5 to UTC+2 time zones. Core Working Hours: 3:00 PM to 5:30 PM UTC - 6:00 PM UTC.
Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join our team, reporting to product engineering management. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for engineering software that supports our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a distributed environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write open source code for collaborative experiences supporting a worldwide top-ten website (over a half a billion pages accessed per day), and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance. On the Editing Team, we support new and experienced volunteers working in 300+ languages with the tools they need to keep Wikipedia accurate and up to date. The team's main area of focus is the flagship VisualEditor, our industry-leading rich-text editing platform which we have been extending to serve new use cases (e.g. DiscussionTools to support on-wiki communication) and unlock new capabilities that lower the barriers people encounter when contributing to Wikipedia. The latest capability being Edit Check, an open-ended system designed to surface actionable pieces of feedback and suggestions that help volunteers improve the quality and integrity of the information Wikipedia offers.
You are responsible for:
- Improving the Wikipedia product experience by fixing bugs and implementing new functionality.
- Iterating on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, other teams, and community members.
- Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant code using Javascript and PHP.
- Building on top of the MediaWiki API ecosystem.
- Instrumenting components to monitor feature behavior and quality characteristics.
Skills and experience:
- 2–5 years related professional or open-source software engineering experience.
- Experience with object-oriented development using a scripting language (such as JavaScript, PHP, Python or Ruby). Most of our work is in JavaScript, PHP and CSS.
- Focused software engineering: you have experience of writing unit tests, and of structuring your work with version control.
- Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happens online, on chats, wikis, documents and tickets.
Qualities that are important to us:
- A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
- An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
- A strong aptitude in algorithms and data structures is essential!
- A desire to write well-documented and maintainable code.
- The willingness to participate in technical discussions, proposing solutions to technical challenges, participating in code reviews and receiving feedback.
- An eagerness and curiosity to solve technical problems, trying things out and investigating issues, and supporting the work of others.
Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:
- Experience building a rich-text editor.
- Experience working with large, legacy codebases.
- A history of editing on Wikimedia projects.
- A history of open-source contribution.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or mathematics, or equivalent experience.
We’d love to hear from you — even if you don’t meet 100% of the criteria listed here. Most important is the aptitude to solve hard problems. Algorithms and data structures are extremely important in our products, so if this sounds interesting, come and talk to us!
Location: Candidates must be within the UTC-5 to UTC+2 time zones. Core Working Hours: 3:00 PM to 5:30 PM UTC - 6:00 PM UTC.
Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join our team, reporting to product engineering management. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for engineering software that supports our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a distributed environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write open source code for collaborative experiences supporting a worldwide top-ten website (over a half a billion pages accessed per day), and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance. On the Editing Team, we support new and experienced volunteers working in 300+ languages with the tools they need to keep Wikipedia accurate and up to date. The team's main area of focus is the flagship VisualEditor, our industry-leading rich-text editing platform which we have been extending to serve new use cases (e.g. DiscussionTools to support on-wiki communication) and unlock new capabilities that lower the barriers people encounter when contributing to Wikipedia. The latest capability being Edit Check, an open-ended system designed to surface actionable pieces of feedback and suggestions that help volunteers improve the quality and integrity of the information Wikipedia offers.
You are responsible for:
- Improving the Wikipedia product experience by fixing bugs and implementing new functionality.
- Iterating on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, other teams, and community members.
- Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant code using Javascript and PHP.
- Building on top of the MediaWiki API ecosystem.
- Instrumenting components to monitor feature behavior and quality characteristics.
Skills and experience:
- 2–5 years related professional or open-source software engineering experience.
- Experience with object-oriented development using a scripting language (such as JavaScript, PHP, Python or Ruby). Most of our work is in JavaScript, PHP and CSS.
- Focused software engineering: you have experience of writing unit tests, and of structuring your work with version control.
- Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happens online, on chats, wikis, documents and tickets.
Qualities that are important to us:
- A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
- An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
- A strong aptitude in algorithms and data structures is essential!
- A desire to write well-documented and maintainable code.
- The willingness to participate in technical discussions, proposing solutions to technical challenges, participating in code reviews and receiving feedback.
- An eagerness and curiosity to solve technical problems, trying things out and investigating issues, and supporting the work of others.
Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:
- Experience building a rich-text editor.
- Experience working with large, legacy codebases.
- A history of editing on Wikimedia projects.
- A history of open-source contribution.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or mathematics, or equivalent experience.
We’d love to hear from you — even if you don’t meet 100% of the criteria listed here. Most important is the aptitude to solve hard problems. Algorithms and data structures are extremely important in our products, so if this sounds interesting, come and talk to us!
Job Details
Salary
US$88,975 to US$139,056
Location
Remote / USA
Key Skills
RubyJavascriptPythonPhpCss