The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help scale and sustain the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and related platform services that power tools, features, communities, and research efforts across Wikimedia projects and beyond.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms
- Deep understanding of database and knowledge graph representation technologies and standards
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or other systems languages. Ability to set up, scale, and investigate systems is more important than expertise in a particular language.
- Experience building and operating production-grade services with SLOs
- Familiarity with modern observability tools (metrics, logging, tracing)
- Understanding of graph databases, search indexes, or data processing pipelines
- Experience working with knowledge graphs or RDF/SPARQL
- Familiarity with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink)
- Comfort with CI/CD pipelines and containerization tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs that power Wikidata’s query infrastructure
- Improve reliability, observability, and automation of the Wikidata Query Service and data pipelines
- Collaborate with SRE, data engineers, and product teams to ensure stability and scalability under growing usage
- Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents, and proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks
- Support platform migrations and system upgrades (e.g., triple stores, streaming ingestion)
- Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD workflows, and service instrumentation
- Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical planning
Other
- Your working hours will need to overlap with UTC+1 to UTC-5 time zones to accommodate members of your team around the world. Being 14:00 UTC to 17:00 UTC, the team's overlapping hours.
- Ability to work collaboratively across disciplines and communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences
- A commitment to learning, resilience, and contributing to a mission-driven engineering culture
- Experience in open source or open knowledge communities
- Familiarity with Wikimedia technologies, Wikidata, or MediaWiki
