Job Description

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to support and drive our work on Abstract Wikipedia, a project that aims to improve knowledge equity by enabling more people to share more knowledge in more languages.

We’re committed to making knowledge available to everyone globally. This is an opportunity to do good while building new technology at the intersection of machine learning, natural language generation, and computational linguistics.

You have empathy for users and colleagues, a collaborative mindset, and data-informed systems thinking. You excel at building a healthy team culture, growing people, helping software engineers achieve their career goals while also creating opportunities for them to flourish and improve technically.

This role supports a geographically distributed team of 4-6 engineers who are building both  Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions, a new technology to enable a collaboratively edited catalog of computer functions that will power Abstract Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation values diversity and recognizes that employees from a broad range of perspectives are essential to creating a knowledge source that benefits everyone. We are committed to inclusion, diversifying tech, and advocating for diversity in our employees, their experiences, and the people we serve.

Our teams build products that enable our communities to achieve our Vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.  

You will be responsible for:

• Collaborating with your team and cross-functional stakeholders to plan, prioritize, and delegate work, balancing project goals with technical requirements and team skillsets.
• Driving execution–ensuring projects are on track, key performance metrics are being met, and work is being actively unblocked.
• Communicating proactively on progress, risks, and outcomes to stakeholders.
• Ensuring the engineering team is engaged and productive, and understands the big picture of the project and how their efforts contribute to it.
• Coaching your team, conducting performance reviews, providing career guidance, and building a professional and inclusive work culture.
• Managing risk and succession planning for the project, documenting and implementing lifecycle management and best practices for the software we build.
• Interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and mentoring engineers with the goal of quickly making them productive and engaged members of your team.

Requirements:

• Minimum of 5-7 years of work experience in Engineering Management, managing engineers of different levels from early career to senior staff level.
• An established track record and prior success in working with a multicultural, distributed team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Excellent interpersonal skills–the ability to interact constructively and develop productive working relationships with management, peers, direct reports, and communities, including non-technical staff.
• Experience with open source development methodologies and open source community.
• Robust analytical, problem-solving, and conceptual skills with the ability to deliver on detail as well as strategy.
• Must be comfortable with evolving requirements and priorities in a dynamic environment.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Excellent communication and follow-up skills. You’re actively engaged, and your team feels involved and well-informed about what’s happening in the team and broader organization
• Experience with remote work and the level of engagement and communication it takes to build a geographically distributed team that is functional and healthy
• Experience with large-scale, global developer ecosystems and platforms and managing the risks and opportunities associated with them.
• Alignment with our mission and values.
• Resilience—we work on new and interesting problems in public and collaborative ways.
• Working together for outcomes, and being willing to change course.
• Sharing a culture of constructive criticism and respect.

Additionally, we would love it if you have:

• Experience editing Wikipedia or with the Wikipedia, Wikidata, or Wikimedia Commons communities or other collaborative enterprises.
• Familiarity with MediaWiki.
• Experience in developing systems using structured content, knowledge graphs, or taxonomies.
• Experience supporting and leading teams developing Web-scale deployments in PHP and JavaScript.