Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our team, reporting to the Sr. Engineering Manager. As the Site Reliability Engineer, you will play a key role in designing, developing, and maintaining reliable, scalable, and highly available infrastructure for our API services. You will contribute heavily to the high impact challenges behind innovating, building, and maintaining Wikipedia’s data feeds for high volume reusers. In this role, you will foster cross department collaboration with the wikimedia foundation SRE teams. You will be responsible for ensuring the uptime, performance, and security of our systems, and work closely with the development team to continuously improve our infrastructure and processes. you will be involved in designing and running the infrastructure and services that interact with the base of Wikimedia Foundation’s projects, including, but not limited to: Kubernetes clusters, application servers, code collaboration infrastructure, and other developer-facing services. You will participate in incident response and be oncall. This role requires frequent work with other members of the enterprise and Foundation SRE team to maintain and improve our systems, as well as interacting with people not in SRE, like Security, Release and Software Engineers, together striving to move our projects and technologies forward.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a new, revenue-generating product that provides fast, comprehensive, reliable, and secure data ingestion for organizations that wish to repurpose Wikimedia/Wikipedia content in third party environments. Wikimedia Enterprise aims to improve the user experience for Wikimedia/Wikipedia readers beyond our own websites; increase the reach and discoverability of Wikimedia/Wikipedia content; and improve awareness and ease of attribution and verifiability of Wikimedia/Wikipedia content by the organizations that reuse our content the most. You can learn more about the project in WIRED and Insider.

We are a distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment, and embrace technologies. We act sort of like a startup within the Wikimedia Foundation: we build quickly, deploy often, and our work has a very high impact on the global knowledge ecosystem. If you are up to the challenge of working on something fast paced, of creating services that will revolutionize the systems distributing our knowledge for billions of people across the world, and enjoy the idea of working with a globally distributed team, you might be just the person we need.

You are responsible for:

• Design, implementation and maintenance of public facing infrastructure and services
• Use of configuration management and deployment tools
• Architectural design and operation at scale
• Monitoring of systems and services, optimization of performance and resource utilization
• Common operating system level tasks such as logging and backup / restore
• Cookbook / runbook implementation for common maintenance actions
• Incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts
• Automation and streamlining of tasks as well as identifying process gaps
• Collaborating with a global and asynchronously communicating team (don’t worry if you have never worked remotely, we’ll help you get used to it)
• Mentoring peers in your areas of technical and operational strength

Skills and Experience:

• Strong experience with automation and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible. Proficient in at least one programming language (Python,, Go, or similar).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies.
• Experience managing Cloud services and discovering cost savings (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Experience with monitoring, logging, and alerting tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK stack.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills, and ability to work effectively under pressure.
• Excellent communication skills with a strong emphasis on contributing to documenting processes and runbooks, and ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.
• Incident Management: Experience with incident management and on-call rotation practices, as well as tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
• SRE Best Practices: Understanding of SRE principles, such as Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and blameless postmortem.
• Familiarity with Wikimedia or other open source projects is a plus.
• If you are passionate about building and maintaining reliable, scalable, and highly available infrastructure on AWS, and thrive in a dynamic and collaborative environment, we encourage you to apply for this exciting opportunity to join our team at Wikimedia Enterprise

Qualities that are important to us:

• Experience with operating highly available infrastructure
• Experience with running applications and services at scale
• Proficient with shell and a programming language used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go,, etc.)
• Comfortable with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (, Ansible, TerraForm etc.)
• Communicative technical English

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience implementing containerization solutions (Docker, ECS, EC2, Kubernetes)
• Experience administering code collaboration software (Gitlab, Gerrit)
• Experience with managing and troubleshooting Event Streaming Services at scale (Kafka, Kinesis, etc)
• Experience with AWS tools is an advantage. Key services include EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, VPC, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM, and KMS
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Familiarity with IaC tools like Terraform, Helm or AWS CDK
• Security: Knowledge of security best practices in AWS, including the shared responsibility model, IAM policies, encryption, and data protection. Familiarity with AWS WAF, AWS Shield, or AWS Security Hub is bonus
• Experience with package management for operating systems (Debian, etc)
• We are avid supporters (and users) of open source software; history of contributing to Open Source projects is valued
• Prior participation in the Wikimedia movement

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.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based in more than 50 countries. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$101,161 to US$157,200 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location.

All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.

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.

More information

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