Job openings/Performance Engineer

YOU ARE ...

... a determined IT professional with a dedication to find innovative ways to improve the database and system performance of the global top 5 web property, always eager to optimize the throughput of any system resources. You are excited about the potential of doing so in a mission-driven, non-profit, open source environment, helping more people to get fast, reliable access to the world's information.

You are passionate about Wikimedia's mission to bring free knowledge to every person on the planet and want to use your expertise and talents for advancing awesomeness in the world and making the world a better place.

JOB TITLE

Performance Engineer (Database and System) [CLOSED]

REPORTS TO

Director of Operations

JOB PURPOSE

Explore and implement creative ways to improve site availability, performance and scalability, may it be in the application, systems or database components. Work with Wikimedia's Operations and Engineering teams in optimizing the use of available system resources.

As a highly specialized position, this opening will remain posted until we have found the right candidate.

JOB SUMMARY

Duties include, but are not limited to the following:

• Investigate and troubleshoot unexpected database, systems and/or application performance problems.
• Develop or use open source tools that increase the visibility and understanding of the behavior of (sub)components in the system, such as profiling tools, graph systems, alerts, etc.
• Establish capacity planning framework. Monitor and trend key metrics to identify potential performance problems that comes with the global growth of our on-line readership and new contents.
• Explore and seek out new concepts, tools and technologies to keep our operations and systems technology stack current and updated.
• Educate and mentor engineers about database and systems performance and avoiding bottlenecks.
• Work with MediaWiki developers on improving MediaWiki performance and resolving (potential) problems.
• Work with third party developers on resolving bugs and performance in open source software relevant for Wikimedia Operations.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Expert level experience with MySQL database internals and administration, e.g., designing HA, tuning for performance and scalability.
• Deep knowledge of Linux internals and various file systems
• Deep knowledge of the systems internals of LAMP stacks and other utilities and tools often used for operations diagnostics
• Deep knowledge of computer and storage architectures, including (memory) caching effects, concurrency control, I/O strategies, etc.
• Strong expertise in scaling large web site, including caching layers (memcached, HTTP caching), storage scaling concepts
• Experience with systems programming and development in languages such as C, Python and PHP
• Experience with debugging running programs, using tools such as gdb, strace, oprofile, maatkit, etc.
• Inquisitive and yearn to learn new concepts and technologies and apply them to the job
• Comfortable working in a highly collaborative, consensus-oriented environment
• At easy working remotely as part of a globally distributed team
• Understanding of the free culture movement is a plus
• Experience living or working outside of your home country is a major plus
• The ideal candidate will be creative, highly motivated, and able to operate effectively in multiple cultural contexts
• You are a proficient English speaker