Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Site Reliability Engineer (Application Platform)

Preferred time zones: (North, Central, South) Americas or Asia

Summary

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to directly support our application platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopædia to millions of people around the globe. Wikipedia and its sister projects are powered strictly by Free and Open Source software with MediaWiki in its core surrounded by an ecosystem of microservices in PHP, NodeJS, Python, Go and Java.

We are a distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment and embrace new technologies. During the past few years we have been transitioning our platform from a monolith to a hybrid, microservices architecture, and started migrating our microservices onto Kubernetes. We’ve adopted Elastic Stack and Prometheus as our de facto logging and monitoring platforms and are improving our automation (we automation).

If you find what we do interesting, if you are up to the challenge of improving the reliability and delivery of one of the Internet’s top 10 websites, and you enjoy the idea of working with a globally distributed team, you might be just the person we need. Come as you are! 

Responsibilities

• Ensure smooth and reliable operation of the MediaWiki application platform, the surrounding ecosystem of microservices, and their dependencies (Memcached, Redis, Kafka, etcd, …)


• Perform platform transformations and migrations towards modernized infrastructure (HHVM to Zend PHP7, bare metal deployments to Kubernetes clusters, active/active multi-data center support, etc.)


• Bring your creativity to improve our current infrastructure and introduce new automation where needed


• Support new code/feature deployments when required


• Troubleshoot, debug and follow-up on emerging issues in our application stack and its surroundings


• Perform day-to-day operational/DevOps tasks on Wikimedia’s wider public facing infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting), as well as reduction of manual, repetitive, automatable tasks (toil).


• Implement and utilize configuration management and deployment tools (Puppet, Kubernetes)


• Assist in the architectural design of new services and making them operate at scale


• Monitoring of systems, services and service clusters, optimization of performance and resource utilization


• Incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure


• Share our values and work in accordance with them

Qualifications

• 3+ years experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team


• Experience in supporting complex web applications running highly available and high traffic infrastructure based on Linux


• Comfortable with configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, etc.), and modern observability infrastructure (monitoring, metrics and logging)


• Aptitude for automation and streamlining of tasks


• Comfortable with shell and scripting languages used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (e.g. Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, etc.)


• Good understanding of Linux/Unix fundamentals and debugging skills


• Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team


• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent in related work experience

Pluses

• Experience managing MediaWiki installations is a major plus


• Track record of open source contributions is highly appreciated


• Experience running PHP/LAMP stack applications is a plus, especially in geographically distributed environments


• Familiarity  with modern distributed container cluster management systems (Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, …)


• Low level systems troubleshooting and debugging (CPU/memory profiling, C/C++ experience, in-depth Linux knowledge)


• Experience with advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.)


• Familiarity with RFC2549 or similar protocols

U.S. Benefits & Perks*

• Fully paid medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and their eligible families (yes, fully paid premiums!)


• The Wellness Program provides reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, baby sitting, continuing education and much more


• The 401(k) retirement plan offers matched contributions at 4% of annual salary


• Flexible and generous time off - vacation, sick and volunteer days, plus 19 paid holidays - including the last week of the year.


• Family friendly! 100% paid new parent leave for seven weeks plus an additional five weeks for pregnancy, flexible options to phase back in after leave, fully equipped lactation room.


• For those emergency moments - long and short term disability, life insurance (2x salary) and an employee assistance program


• Pre-tax savings plans for health care, child care, elder care, public transportation and parking expenses


• Telecommuting and flexible work schedules available


• Appropriate fuel for thinking and coding (aka, a pantry full of treats) and monthly massages to help staff relax


• Great colleagues - diverse staff and contractors speaking dozens of languages from around the world, fantastic intellectual discourse, mission-driven and intensely passionate people

*Eligible international workers' benefits are specific to their location and dependent on their employer of record

More information

WMF
Blog
Wikimedia 2030
Wikimedia Medium Term Plan
Diversity and inclusion information for Wikimedia workers, by the numbers
Wikimania 2019
Annual Report - 2017