Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (Databases) to join our SRE team to build, optimize and support the platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopædia to millions of people around the globe. Wikipedia and its sister projects are a globally distributed architecture powered strictly by Free and Open Source software. The stack has MediaWiki at its core and MariaDB as its data store, surrounded by an ecosystem of microservices in PHP, NodeJS, Python, Go and Java.

The Wikimedia community continuously generates text content in the form of new articles, revisions and discussions. As part of our team you would have the opportunity to solve the storage, scaling, access and backup challenges that Wikipedias’ scale provides.

We currently use self-hosted MariaDB as our main RDBMS. Our goal is configuring and managing the database infrastructure in a way that maximizes the service uptime for Wikimedia projects’ users while at the same time simplifying the operational processes, automating repeatable tasks and applying industry best practices.

We are a globally distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment and embrace new technologies. If you find what we do interesting, if you are up to the challenge of improving the reliability and delivery of one of the Internet’s top 10 websites, and you enjoy the idea of working in a remote-first role, we may be the right place for you.

You are responsible for:

• Operate and improve the RDBMS systems serving Wikimedia projects
• Respond to common database issues, following documented procedures
• Collaborate with SRE and other teams across the organization to ensure their specific database needs are met on an ongoing basis
• Perform day-to-day operational/DevOps tasks on Wikimedia’s public facing infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting)
• Implement and utilize configuration management and deployment tools
• Monitor systems, services and service clusters, optimize performance and resource utilization
• Participate in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
• Share our values and work in accordance with them

Skills and Experience:

• 2 years experience in a DBA role as part of a team
• 3 years experience with Linux in a production environment
• Knowledge and experience of (Free and Open Source) RDBMS (preferably MariaDB or MySQL) administration (understanding of and experience with replication is essential) and support, debugging query performance and schema design
• Comfortable with shell and at least one of the scripting languages used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, etc.)
• Passion for automating tasks and processes
• Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience working with or as a part of SRE/Operations/DevOps teams
• Experience with NoSQL products (Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc.)
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/redis, MySQL) - MediaWiki familiarity would be great!
• Developing Free and Open Source software, or being part of an open-source community

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 has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or 1 (415) 839-6885.

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