Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Summary

Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our Service Operations SRE team, where we take care of the infrastructure that runs wikipedia.org and other Wikimedia Foundation projects.  

The SRE team at Wikimedia is a distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment, and embrace new technologies. The SRE Service Operations team focuses on the application layer of our complex infrastructure as well as our developer-facing services. Our stack includes MediaWiki instances running on bare metal, surrounding microservices running on our own Kubernetes platform, an in-house designed deployment pipeline, and open source collaboration software (Gerrit, Gitlab, and Phabricator). We ❤️automation, and we automate as much as we can using primarily Python, Puppet, and Spicerack (https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-software-spicerack). We work in the open and document our work on our internal task management system and our technical wiki (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org). Feel free to check out our activities there!

As a senior engineer in the SRE Service Operations team, you will be involved in designing and running the infrastructure and services that form the base of Wikimedia Foundation’s projects, including, but not limited to: Kubernetes clusters, application servers, related datastores, and other developer-facing services. You will participate in 24/7 incident response and be on-call rotation. This role requires frequent work with other members of the 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.

We use more technologies than we can list here, and are interested in your experience even if it doesn’t exactly match the keywords above / below. If you find what we do interesting and enjoy the idea of working with a globally distributed team that runs a Top-15 website, we may be what you’re looking for!

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
• Proactively identify sources of instability in distributed systems and analyze how complex systems fail from a reliability and resilience perspective.
• Common operating system level tasks such as logging and backup / restore
• Cookbook / runbook implementation for common maintenance actions 
• Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation and escalations for resolving production issues
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews, contributing to failure analysis and implementing preventive measures
• 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
• Expected to travel domestically or potentially internationally 2-3 times in a year for team gatherings and conferences

Skills and Experience:

• 5+ years of experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role
• Experience with operating highly available infrastructure
• Experience with running applications and services at scale
• Experience implementing containerization solutions (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Proficient with shell and a programming language used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Ruby, etc.)
• Comfortable with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, TerraForm etc.)
• Communicative technical English

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• 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
• Familiarity with RFC 2549
• Prior participation in the Wikimedia movement

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 40+ 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$109,047  to US$169,455   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. 

*Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States of America and Uruguay.  Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR). 

We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements. 

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 [email protected] or +1 (415) 839-6885.

More information

U.S. Benefits & Perks

Applicant Privacy Policy

Wikimedia Foundation

What does the Wikimedia Foundation do?

What makes Wikipedia different from social media platforms?

Our Projects

Our Tech Stack

News from across the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Blog

Wikimedia 2030