Senior Software Engineer

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
• Integrate Wikidata Platform services with other systems and data sources across Wikimedia
• Collaborate with SRE, data engineers, and product teams to ensure stability and scalability
• Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents, and resolve bottlenecks
• Support platform migrations and system upgrades such as triple stores and streaming ingestion
• Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD workflows, and service instrumentation
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical planning
• Document systems and share knowledge with the broader technical community

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms
• Deep understanding of database and/or knowledge graph representation technologies and standards
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or other systems languages
• Experience building and operating production-grade services with SLOs
• Familiarity with modern observability tools including metrics, logging, and tracing
• Experience in data processing systems such as graph databases, search indexes, or data processing pipelines
• Ability to work collaboratively across disciplines and communicate clearly

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with knowledge graphs or RDF/SPARQL
• Familiarity with streaming data systems like Kafka or Flink
• Comfort with CI/CD pipelines and containerization tools such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience in open source or open knowledge communities
• Familiarity with Wikimedia technologies, Wikidata, or MediaWiki

About the Company

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.