Senior Data Engineer

Position Overview

The Wikimedia Foundation's Data Platform team enables Wikipedia and its sister projects, reaching billions of users monthly across 300+ languages and powered by 200,000+ volunteer contributors. As a Senior Data Engineer on the Data Platform, you will shape the future of how Wikimedia’s vast data ecosystem serves both internal teams and the global community. You will drive the Data Platform Engineering team's effort to unify data systems across the Wikimedia Foundation, delivering scalable solutions that support internal and external platform users and the open knowledge movement. Our vision is a world where every single human being can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge, including access to data for research, feature development, and advancing artificial intelligence responsibly.

Requirements

Experience

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, with a significant portion focused on on-premise systems (e.g., Hadoop, HDFS).
• Practical knowledge of engineering best practices with a strong emphasis on system robustness and maintainability.
• Hands-on experience in troubleshooting systems and pipelines for performance and scaling.
• Demonstrated consistency with tenure at companies (e.g., average of 2+ years, ideally including longer engagements).
• Desirable: Exposure to architectural/system design or technical leadership tasks.
• Desirable: Experience in data governance, data lineage, and data quality initiatives.

Core Technical Skills

• Expertise in tools like Airflow, Kafka, Spark, and Hive.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and Java/Scala, with deep knowledge of one language and its ecosystem.
• Advanced working knowledge of SQL and experience with various database/query dialects (e.g., MariaDB, HiveQL, CassandraQL, Spark SQL, Presto).

Bonus Skills

• Familiarity with additional technologies such as Flink, Iceberg, Druid, Presto, Cassandra, Kubernetes, and Docker.
• Expertise in AI development tooling and AI applications in data engineering and analytics.

Other Skills

• Familiarity with stream processing frameworks like Spark Streaming or Flink.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to interact effectively within and across teams.
• Ability to produce clear, well-documented technical designs and articulate ideas to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Designing and Building Data Pipelines: Develop scalable, robust infrastructure and processes using tools such as Airflow, Spark, and Kafka.
• Monitoring and Alerting for Data Quality: Implement systems to detect and address potential data issues promptly.
• Supporting Data Governance and Lineage: Assist in designing and implementing solutions to track and manage data across pipelines.
• Data Platform Development: Contribute to the design and improvement of the shared data platform, enabling critical use cases such as product analytics, bot detection, and image classification.
• Enhancing Operational Excellence: Identify and implement improvements in system reliability, maintainability, and performance.

Work Environment

You’ll join a geographically distributed team and report to the Engineering Manager, Data Platform Engineering. We operate lean teams with significant maintenance scope and ambitious goals to scale the Wikimedia Foundation’s data capabilities. Our work directly impacts billions of users while advancing open knowledge accessibility.

Company Information

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.

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