Engineering Manager

Overview

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for an experienced engineering manager to oversee 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, and who will strive to help Wikimedia software developers learn to incorporate performance into their development practices.

The Engineering Manager will work with the 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.

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 of 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.

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote

As an Engineering Manager, we’d like you to do these things:

• Be the performance standard bearer in the Foundation and our communities.
• Be visible in the performance community and work to influence others and bring learnings to the team.
• Work together with the other team members to identify areas for performance improvement and the needed solutions.
• Serve as a subject matter expert on performance and a resource to engineering teams across the Foundation.
• Manage a team of four members, conduct performance reviews, hiring, goal-setting, compensation planning, and career development.
• Design and develop performance-centric enhancements of Wikimedia systems.
• Conduct performance reviews of software designs and implementations.
• Define and manage department budget.

We’d like you to have these skills:

• A recognized expert in performance.
• 5+ years of relevant work experience.
• 3+ years of technical leadership experience.
• 3+ years of experience managing a small engineering 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.
• Contributing to the Wikipedia or Wikimedia project communities.
• Virtualization technologies.
• 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.)
• Static analysis tools such as Veracode, pfff, PHP-sat, or PHP_CodeSniffer.
• C/C++ debugging using open source tools like gdb or Valgrind.
• Operating system internals, filesystems, programming language design, or compilers.

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!