Description

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is seeking a passionate and skilled Software Engineer to join our vital Trust and Safety Product team. In this role, you will be instrumental in building features that protect our global communities from abuse, harassment, vandalism, and harmful or illicit content. You will thrive in our fully remote, geographically distributed environment, where teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach are highly valued. You'll contribute open-source code for collaborative experiences supporting over a billion users, all within an organization that champions a healthy work-life balance.

The Trust and Safety Product team is an interdisciplinary group dedicated to developing technology that effectively counteracts efforts to undermine civil discourse on our platforms, the integrity of our vast content, and the safety of our users. We are looking for a dedicated Software Engineer to join us in this critical mission to safeguard our users and our projects.

Currently, our team is focused on a broad range of tools related to user privacy and protection, with more details available in our [link to backlog, if applicable]. Your daily contributions will involve developing new patches and pull requests for existing features, providing thoughtful estimations for new work, actively participating in code reviews, collaborating closely with a talented designer, and guiding volunteer engineers in shaping their code contributions. Given the sensitive nature of the tools we build, you will regularly interact with database administrators, security engineers, and our legal team. Our work extends beyond traditional product development, delving into crucial areas such as privacy, security, abuse mitigation, content moderation, and legal compliance.

Our team is well-rounded, comprising a dedicated Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Product Designer, Research Analyst, Data Analyst, Community Liaison, experienced Test Engineers, and a collaborative group of Software Engineers.

You will have the opportunity to work on and improve a codebase that has evolved organically over two decades. Much of our foundational framework code was developed in-house, requiring a comfortable approach to learning through independent research, thorough review of patches, and diligent study of existing documentation. PHP and JavaScript form the majority of our codebase. Developers at the Foundation enjoy a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, enabling you to have a significant and immediate impact on the future of our sites and the broader Wikimedia movement.

Recognizing the vast and often complex nature of our global ecosystem, we place a strong emphasis on clear communication, genuine enthusiasm, and a proactive eagerness to learn, valuing these qualities as much as formal certifications or academic degrees.

Responsibilities

• Developing, rigorously testing, and reliably deploying new features, valuable improvements, and essential upgrades to various systems and tools utilized by administrators and staff.
• Writing performant, accessible, and multilingual user interfaces using PHP, JavaScript, VueJS, and CSS, ensuring a seamless experience for our diverse global user base.
• Thoroughly documenting your contributions to our codebase within our technical documentation and in clear, concise feature documentation.
• Contributing to impactful projects that necessitate careful handling of sensitive data and private information, ensuring strict compliance with all relevant privacy and security regulations.
• Providing crucial support in abuse investigations on our platform, actively helping to identify the sources and underlying causes of incidents, and proactively proposing innovative ideas to effectively mitigate their impact.
• Developing deep expertise in the critical Trust and Safety domain, encompassing key areas such as security, privacy, abuse mitigation, content moderation, and legal compliance.
• Extending the capabilities of the MediaWiki stack to effectively serve the diverse needs of our global communities by thoughtfully incorporating possibilities offered by new tooling and emerging technical advancements.
• Collaborating effectively across various teams to proactively reduce technical debt through strategic code refactoring, diligent updating of testing frameworks, and providing constructive feedback through thorough code reviews of other engineers' contributions.

Skills and experience

• 3+ years of demonstrable professional or significant volunteering experience in software engineering roles, with a strong emphasis on backend development alongside frontend experience.
• Proven experience with Object-Oriented development utilizing a scripting language (such as PHP, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript). Our primary languages are PHP and JavaScript.
• Demonstrated experience in translating design mockups into fully functional components, thoughtfully incorporating performance and accessibility considerations into the features through well-documented and readable code.
• A focused approach to software engineering, including writing comprehensive unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security vulnerabilities and code review feedback, and thoughtfully balancing technical tradeoffs.
• Strong written communication skills, essential for our highly collaborative online environment utilizing chats, wikis, shared documents, and ticketing systems.

Qualities that are important to us

• A genuine desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access for all.
• A strong emphasis on communicating clearly and effectively across both synchronous and asynchronous communication channels.
• A proactive willingness to actively participate in technical discussions, contribute to proposing solutions for technical challenges, engage in constructive code reviews, and be receptive to feedback.
• A strong eagerness and inherent curiosity to solve complex technical problems, actively experimenting and thoroughly investigating issues, and providing valuable support to the work of your colleagues.
• The ability to effectively work with technical documentation, writing clearly and concisely, and efficiently navigating existing documentation to find necessary information.
• A strong sensitivity for the complex problems we are addressing, genuine empathy for our diverse users, and the necessary tact to handle the sensitive content and information we process responsibly.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have this

• Direct experience with MediaWiki development or as an active contributor to Wikimedia projects.
• Experience working with legacy codebases and/or prior experience in free/open-source software development.
• Familiarity with online community moderation principles, vandalism prevention techniques, and other core Trust and Safety concepts and practices.

Note: If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don’t check 100% of the boxes—that’s okay—we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.