Overview

Location: Remote

Contract period: 6 months

Summary

Wikimedia projects are built to be collaborative, multilingual and usable by people from around the world. The Language team works on projects that enable users to work together, and to contribute in more than 300 languages. Currently the team is developing and maintaining translation tools and localisation infrastructure for software developed in Wikimedia Foundation.

As a Software Engineer on the team you will be working with other Software Engineers, Product Managers, Designers and QA Engineers to write, review and test code, write documentation and participate in engineering discussions and other engineering activities.

Our team is fully remote and team members work from various places around Europe and India.

As a Software Engineer, we would like you to:

  • Follow common software development discipline, which includes use of issue trackers and version control, code peer review, and synchronous and asynchronous communication methods.
  • Improve the reliability and maintainability of Wikimedia’s continuous localisation infrastructure by fixing bugs and developing new features, executing manual tasks and automating them.
  • Develop our translation tool (Translate) to enable our volunteer translators and translation admins to be more productive while translating various kind of for non-article content.

We value:

  • Clearly and concisely communicating ideas about software and software development
  • A desire to create features that work well for everyone
  • Comfortable working in a multi-cultural, remote, distributed team across various time zones
  • An interest in working with legacy software and modernizing code

Requirements

  • Bachelor’s or master’s degree; or equivalent professional experience
  • 2+ years of experience in software development
  • At least basic knowledge of web technologies, mainly PHP, JavaScript and CSS and desire to learn more on the job
  • Comfortable working with the command line
  • Knowledge of developing and debugging in Linux/Unix (LAMP) environments.
  • Interest in focused software engineering: you enjoy writing unit tests, reviewing code and responding to code reviews, and discussing architectural approach

Plus

  • Experience with open source software development processes
  • System administration experience
  • Knowledge about ElasticSearch
  • Practical experience or studies in internationalization, localisation, linguistics or translation
  • Good command of more than one language

We’d like to see your work!  Here are a few things you’ll need:

  • If there are any existing open source software that you’ve developed or translated (these could be your own software or patches to other packages), please share the URLs for the source. Links to your projects on GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. are exceptionally useful.

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.

The Wikimedia Foundation is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply

More information

WMF

Blog

Annual Report – 2017

Wikimedia 2030