Group Product Manager, Data Platform Engineering

GROUP PRODUCT MANAGER, DATA PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Summary

Wikipedia and its sister projects are among the most popular media properties in the world, visited by over 1 billion people a month across over 300 different languages. These sites generate a tremendous amount of data on how people learn and collaborate. The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a group product manager to guide the development and evolution of our data platforms, the collection of technologies we use to understand how Wikipedia works, improve its experiences, and spread free knowledge.

The group product manager is a leader in the strategic decision-making and tactical execution for the Data Products, Data Engineering, Search, and Data Platform Site Reliability teams. This role shares leadership responsibility with the Director of Engineering for Data Platform Engineering, and works in collaboration with data analysts, researchers, and product teams building user-facing features for reading and editing Wikipedia on the web and mobile apps. This is a people management role, managing two individually-contributing product managers.

In this role, you and your group of product managers will guide the evolution of our data pipelines, data lake, experiment platform, and analytics tools. This includes ingestion, orchestration, computation, and serving data using a variety of technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Hadoop, Spark, Airflow, Iceberg, Kubernetes, Superset and OpenSearch. A strong candidate will have deep experience building a data platform to serve product analytics and production needs, and be technically conversant in the relevant technologies.

This position will report to the Senior Director of Product, Core Experiences.

Candidates must be available for critical meetings and synchronous work between 15:00 UTC and 18:00 UTC, and open to traveling internationally up to four times per year.

Accountabilities

• Ensuring the accuracy, usefulness, reliability, and accessibility of our data products
• Defining and setting priorities and roadmaps for Data Platform Engineering teams across four domains: data engineering, search, experimentation, and site reliability
• Product lifecycle management of the products, services, and tools of the Data Platform Engineering teams
• Co-developing product strategy, providing leadership, and making and facilitating sound decisions
• Managing and developing a team of product managers
• Partnering with user-facing product teams to use the data platform to guide product decisions and build derived-data products

Expected Skills and Experience

• Minimum of 5 years of product management experience with data or infrastructure products
• Experience hiring and managing product managers
• Success delivering data and analytical products and services depended on by multiple product teams
• Expertise in data analytics, A/B testing, search, and data architecture
• Strong understanding of modern techniques for handling high-scale data
• Knowledge of search technologies
• Experience navigating privacy issues around data collection, retention, and distribution
• Ability to work with multiple stakeholder teams to deliver results through lateral influence and collaboration

Important Qualities

• Commitment to the mission and values of the Wikimedia Foundation
• Effective at asynchronous communication in a distributed workplace
• Able to navigate and make decisions in circumstances with limited, incomplete, and conflicting information
• Focus on iterative delivery and minimum viability to provide value to customer teams
• Effective at clear, written communication for strategy, plans, roadmaps, and decisions, for a wide range of audiences including individual contributor engineers, volunteer contributors, and department leadership

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience with open source, open data, or open knowledge communities
• Experience building products for m