Engineering Manager, Product Safety and Security

Employment Type: [Not Specified] Location Type: [Not Specified] Salary: [Not Specified]

Position Overview

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an experienced and mission-driven Engineering Manager to lead the security and privacy engineering group within the Product Safety and Security team. This role will also advise the Foundation on critical security and privacy issues.

The Product Safety and Security team comprises two closely integrated engineering groups. This position manages a team of security and privacy engineers dedicated to strengthening the security and privacy of applications that power Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The role involves close collaboration with a peer engineering group focused on promoting the integrity of the Wikipedia platform and ensuring the safety of its contributors. Both engineering groups report to the Director of Engineering, MediaWiki.

This leadership position partners closely with the Group Product Manager for Safety and Security to define and implement the Product Safety and Security team’s roadmap and priorities.

Note: We are only considering candidates based in time zones from UTC−5 to UTC+2.

Why This Role Matters

The Wikimedia Foundation operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. We are deeply committed to the security, privacy, and integrity of these projects and the volunteer community that sustains them. The Product Safety and Security team plays a pivotal role in guiding how the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects adapt to increasingly complex threats.

Responsibilities

• Lead a group of security and privacy engineers in protecting the Wikimedia Foundation’s people, project integrity, infrastructure, and other assets against threats.
• Advise product management across the Foundation on security best practices and the security implications of various product decisions.
• Help establish the Wikimedia Foundation’s overall security and safety roadmap, ensuring delivery against technical and organizational goals.
• Collaborate effectively with Product & Engineering teams, Legal, ITS, and other departments.
• Set direction, unblock work, and ensure delivery against technical and organizational goals.
• Establish and lead the execution of group processes, including sprint planning, security releases and deployments, and security incident response.
• Hire and develop a high-performing, inclusive engineering group that builds and owns security-critical software and operates from a shared sense of mission.

Skills and Experience

• Experience managing engineers and engineering teams responsible for infrastructure, platform, or developer-facing tools.
• Strong technical background with experience in systems engineering, cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, OpenStack, etc.), and developer platform architecture.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional collaboration and product-oriented development in open communities or large-scale developer ecosystems.
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills, particularly in distributed and asynchronous environments.
• Ability to travel 2-3 times a year.

Additionally, We’d Love It If You Have:

• Experience managing engineering teams with a focus on security.
• Experience contributing to or leading in open-source projects.
• Familiarity with Wikipedia or Wikimedia projects.
• A passion for building inclusive platforms that lower barriers to entry and empower a diverse set of contributors.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that 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 freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, and support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible.