Job openings/Code Maintenance Engineer
From the Wikimedia Foundation
YOU ARE ...
... an experienced software engineer who is attracted by the idea of working in the eye of the storm with a mission-driven, open source, non-profit organization. The Wikimedia Foundation has a small, passionate technical team which keeps Wikipedia and Wikimedia's other projects running. In this role, you're responsible for dealing with a large share of incoming contributions from a global, decentralized volunteer community, reviewing code, helping to whip it into shape, integrating or fixing up dormant extensions and scripts, and supporting deployment. At the same time, you do not lose focus of building systems for automating tests and thereby making your own work more effective over time.
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Position
Code Maintenance Engineer
Reports to
Chief Technical Officer
Description
The core purpose of this job is to review and resolve bug reports, enhancement requests, code changes and extensions relevant to Wikimedia's free education projects, and to implement systematic testing procedures. This is a very hands-on role for an experienced software engineer who is interested in achieving high impact in a fast-paced environment with a public benefit mission.
Responsibilities
- Review and assess bug reports and enhancement requests, close reports where possible, or find an appropriate assignee
- Review code changes made to MediaWiki by volunteer contributors, and resolve quality issues or revert changes
- Take initiative to refine and integrate volunteer-created priority projects (extensions, scripts, Toolserver developments, etc.)
- Generally support the deployment process for significant changes to the software and operations infrastructure
- Implement test suites to automate testing, and recruit volunteers to support the QA process where possible
- Create systems that effectively measure the operational impact of changes relative to load, traffic, memory consumption and others as needed
Required qualifications
- 5+ years experience with web application development, including deep experience with PHP/MySQL development
- Experience diagnosing, reporting, tracking and resolving software quality issues
- Experience specifically with best practices in secure and scalable web application development
- Experience with MediaWiki and Bugzilla a major plus
- Experience dealing with user-submitted bug reports and feature requests is a major plus
- Ability to develop automated custom QA solutions without relying on commercial software packages
- Linux/Unix shell, Python, Java, etc. experience welcome
- Any other free/open software development experience highly welcome
- You must be comfortable in a highly collaborative, consensus-oriented environment.
- Experience with wikis and participatory production environments is a plus.
- Understanding of the free culture movement is a plus.
- The ideal candidate will be creative, highly motivated, and able to operate effectively in multiple cultural contexts.
Salary
The salary is in the range of $85,000 to $95,000, commensurate with experience, plus benefits.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible non-profit charity dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most visited websites, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikinews and the Wikimedia Commons media repository. The organization has received numerous honors for its work, among them the Webby Award, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, the Japan Advertisers Association's Web Creation Award and the World Technology Award in Communications Technology.
The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of Wikipedia and its sister projects and is based in San Francisco, California. It currently employs 33 staff members. Wikimedia is supported by local chapter organizations in 27 countries or regions.
Apply
Please send a CV and cover letter to jobs
wikimedia.org before October 23, 2009. Please put the position title (Code Maintenance Engineer) in your subject line.
Applications that do not include a cover letter will not be considered. This position will be filled in November 2009.
Please provide URLs to any existing free software work you may have done (own software or patches to other packages) if possible – we'd love to see what you can do! Let us know why this position interests you.
Please copy and paste the text of your CV into the e-mail, in addition to attaching the file.
Due to the volume of applications we receive, we regret that only those selected for an interview will be contacted.
Local San Francisco, CA candidates are preferred though remote candidates will be considered.
