Software Engineer - Growth Team - Full Stack

Position Overview

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking product software engineers to join the Growth team, reporting to product engineering management. As a product engineer, you will be responsible for building user-facing components for our product user experiences. This role is remote, emphasizing teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You will contribute to open-source code for collaborative experiences supporting over half a billion page views daily, within an organization that values work-life balance.

The Growth team's mission is to support new account holders by designing and building engaging, intuitive, and inclusive products that simplify joining the Wikimedia movement. We aim for a thriving Wikimedia community where contributing to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects has a low barrier to entry, enabling more people to become active editors and advance into experienced roles, fostering a sustainable and diverse knowledge commons. Current projects focus on machine-learning driven task recommendations and volunteer mentorship.

Responsibilities

• Improving the Wikipedia new contributor and moderation experience by building new functionality primarily in the GrowthExperiments extension and fixing bugs for code maintained by the team.
• Collaborating with product managers, designers, and other teams on shared projects.
• Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant user interfaces using JavaScript, VueJS, and CSS.
• Building upon existing Design System Library components and creating new ones as needed.
• Utilizing existing MediaWiki APIs and extending the MediaWiki stack to serve diverse community needs with new tooling and technical advancements.
• Writing unit and integration tests.
• Proactively addressing security and code review feedback.
• Working across teams to reduce technical debt through refactoring, updating testing frameworks, and reviewing code.
• Instrumenting components to monitor user behavior and performance characteristics.

Requirements

• 3-5 years of related professional experience in programming roles with a foundational understanding of frontend and backend concepts.
• Experience in JavaScript.
• Experience in PHP or Python.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver features collaboratively in a team environment.
• Experience converting design mockups into functional components.
• Experience incorporating performance and accessibility into features.
• Experience writing well-documented and readable code.

Desired Qualities

• A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
• Strong emphasis on clear communication in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• A willingness to adopt new technical approaches and engineering thought patterns for problem-solving.
• Interest in mentoring, teaching, and sharing technical knowledge.

Additionally, we'd love it if you have:

• Experience working with internationally distributed teams or organizations.
• Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress).
• Experience with Bash, VueJS, and/or Docker.
• Experience working with projects or communities in languages other than English.
• Experience working with large, legacy codebases.

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 is more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.