Description:

Job Title: Software Engineer

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join the Trust and Safety Product team. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for building features to keep our communities safe from abuse, harassment, vandalism, and harmful or illicit content.  In this role, you will work in a fully-remote, geographically-distributed environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You will be writing open source code for collaborative experiences supporting over a billion users at a place that believes we’re all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.

The Trust and Safety Product team is an interdisciplinary product team developing technology that helps counteract efforts to harm civil discourse on our platforms, the integrity of the content, or other users of our projects. We are seeking a software engineer to join us in this effort to protect our users and our projects.

Currently, we are working on a broad set of tools related to user privacy and protection. You can see more details in our backlog. Your daily work will include contributing new patches or pull requests for existing features, estimating new work, participating in code reviews, collaborating with a designer, or helping a volunteer engineer get their code shaped up. Because of the sensitive nature of the tools we build, we interact with database administrators, security engineers, and our legal team on a regular basis. Our work goes beyond regular product development into topics such as privacy, security, abuse mitigation, content moderation and legal compliance.

The team is fully staffed with a Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Product Designer, Research Analyst, Data Analyst, Community Liaison, Test Engineers, and several Software Engineers, of course.

You will be working on, and improving, a codebase that has evolved over two decades. Much of our framework code was developed in-house, so you’ll need to be comfortable learning through research, reviewing patches, and reading documentation. PHP and JavaScript make up most of our code. Developers at the Foundation have autonomy and responsibility, and can have a large and immediate impact on the future of the site and the movement.

Our world is vast and can be complicated, so we consider communication, enthusiasm, and eagerness to learn as important as certificates or degrees.

Responsibilities

• Developing, testing, and deploying new features, improvements and upgrades to various systems and tools used by administrators and staff.
• Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant user interfaces using PHP, JavaScript, VueJS, and CSS.
• Documenting your contributions to our codebase in our technical documentation and our features’ documentation.
• Contributing to projects that require handling sensitive data and private information, complying with privacy and security regulations.
• Providing support in abuse investigations on our platform, helping identify sources and causes of incidents, and proposing ideas to mitigate their impact.
• Developing expertise in the Trust and Safety area, which includes, security, privacy, abuse mitigation, content moderation and legal compliance.
• Extending the capabilities of the MediaWiki stack to serve diverse community needs by incorporating possibilities that are offered by new tooling or technical advances.
• Working across teams to proactively reduce technical debt by refactoring code, updating testing frameworks, and reviewing code from other engineers.

Skills and experience

• 3+ years of related professional or volunteering experience in software engineering roles, including frontend and backend development, with an emphasis on backend.
• Experience with Object-Oriented development using a scripting language (such as PHP, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript). Most of our work is in PHP and JavaScript.
• Experience converting design mockups into functional components, incorporating performance and accessibility into the features using well-documented and readable code.
• Focused software engineering: writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and thoughtfully balancing tradeoffs.
• Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happens online, on chats, wikis, documents and tickets.

Qualities that are important to us

• The desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
• An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• The willingness to participate in technical discussions, proposing solutions to technical challenges, participating in code reviews and receiving feedback.
• An eagerness and curiosity to solve technical problems, trying things out and investigating issues, and supporting the work of others.
• The skill to effectively work with documentation, writing clearly and concisely, and navigating existing documentation in search for answers.
• A sensitivity for the problems we are solving, empathy for our users, and the tact to handle the content and information we process.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have this

• Experience with MediaWiki development or as a contributor to Wikimedia projects.
• Experience with legacy codebases and/or experience in free/open source software development experience.
• Experience with online community moderation, vandalism prevention and other Trust and Safety concepts and practices