Overview

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for an experienced engineer to lead our Performance Team. We are looking for someone who is passionate about Wikimedia’s mission to bring free knowledge to every person on the planet.

YOU ARE … a smart, experienced, hands on software professional that understands all aspects of performance in a top web property. You have significant software performance experience in large scale systems. You have experience counseling engineering and non-engineering teams about performance requirements and implications on their projects. You know how to build software to the highest standards and hold others to the same high standards. You embrace the concepts of open source software development and the importance of community building. You have experience with and enjoy working with highly technical and passionate teams. You enjoy being part of a large, vibrant, passionate, and involved community.

You will be managing a team responsible for ensuring the performance of applications written in PHP and JavaScript, using both relational and key-value data storage mechanisms. The team intervenes at any level of the Wikimedia production stack, including its caching, traffic layers, and more. You should be comfortable auditing and improving performance in languages and tools you’ve never worked with before. Given the diversity of our software stack, the ability to get out of one’s comfort zone is a must-have skill to manage the Performance Team.

You will be driving and producing most of the team’s communication, which can take the form of collaboration with other teams, advocacy, internal and external talks, blog posts and more. You will be the chief performance evangelist to the Foundation, the Movement and the greater Web Performance community.

As Engineering Manager, you will work with the other Product and Technology teams at Wikimedia who support engineers and designers building features, products, and services used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. This is an opportunity to do good while improving the performance of one of the best known sites in the world.

As a Performance Team lead, we’d like you to do these things:

  • Work together with the other team members to identify areas for performance improvement and the needed solutions
  • Conduct performance reviews of software designs and implementations
  • Be an expert and resource on performance to engineering teams across the Foundation
  • Design and develop performance-centric enhancements of Wikimedia systems
  • Manage a team of four members, conduct performance reviews, hiring, goal-setting, compensation planning, and career development
  • Define and manage team budget

We’d like you to have these skills:

  • An expert in performance
  • 5+ years of relevant work experience
  • 3+ years of technical leadership experience
  • 3+ years of experience managing a small team with a minimum of 3 direct reports
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills

It would be great if you have experience in one or more of these:

  • Bachelor’s degree or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related field
  • Working on a large, mature, open source project
  • Building and maintaining large-scale server applications
  • Developing and debugging in Linux (LAMP) environments
  • Knowledge of PHP, HHVM and JavaScript
  • Debugging front-end JavaScript web applications in Chrome or Firefox
  • Linux system administration and automation using shell scripting (bash, ZSH, etc.)
  • C/C++ debugging using open source tools like gdb or Valgrind
  • Static analysis tools such as Veracode, pfff, PHP-sat, or PHP_CodeSniffer
  • Operating system internals, filesystems, programming language design, or compilers
  • Virtualization technologies
  • Contributing to the Wikipedia or Wikimedia project communities

Please provide URLs to any existing free software work you may have done (your own software or patches to other packages) if possible – we’d love to see what you can do!

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia projects receive more than 500 million page views per day [1] and reach more than 700 million unique devices monthly. Wikipedia, the largest project the Wikimedia Foundation hosts, contains more than 40 million articles in 238 languages contributed by more than 70,000 active Wikipedians.

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, massages, cooking classes, 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
  • Pre-tax savings plans for health care, child care, elder care, public transportation, and parking expenses
  • For those emergency moments – long and short term disability, life insurance (2x salary), and an employee assistance program
  • 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 – international staff speaking dozens of languages from around the world, fantastic intellectual discourse, mission-driven, and intensely passionate people

* for benefits eligible staff, benefits may vary by location

More Information

https://wikimediafoundation.org

https://blog.wikimedia.org