Our small team is passionate about making knowledge discoverable. We are responsible for the search engine used on Wikipedia, its sister projects, and for the Wikidata Query Service.
We are looking for a software engineer to help us bring the Search Platform team to the next level.
We use open-source tools as much as possible, and always open source our own work. Java, PHP, Python and Scala make up most of our code, but we value using the right tool for the job. Our world is vast and can be complicated, so we value communication, enthusiasm, and an eagerness to learn.
You are responsible for:
- Work and communicate clearly and effectively within a small team that spans multiple time zones across the world
- Help maintain, scale, and extend our Elasticsearch-based search engine
- Improve the integration of Search, Wikidata Query Service, and the MediaWiki platform
- Get your hands dirty to fix things at all levels of the stack
Skills and Experience:
- Good working knowledge of software design principles
- Good understanding of how to scale applications, in terms of load, complexity, and performance
- Ability to work in a Linux server environment
- Write code in Java and PHP that stands the test of time
- Demonstrated experience in large-scale Java or PHP applications
- Be willing to travel occasionally - sometimes internationally - for team and organizational meetings
- Proficient English speaker and writer
Additionally, we’d love it if you have:
- Degree in computer science, statistics, math, physics or other quantitative discipline; equivalent experience learned hands-on on the job also works
- Experience with Elasticsearch, Solr, Lucene or another search engine
- Experience working on open source, collaborative development projects
- Understanding of free culture / free software / open source principles
- Exposure to applied machine learning (ML), deep learning, or natural language processing (NLP)
- Familiarity with statistics
- Experience with an internet software environment operating at scale; for example, messaging platforms that process hundreds of thousands of events per second
- Big thumbs ups if you are a contributor to Wikipedia
Show us your stuff! If you have any existing open-source software that you've developed (this could be your own software or patches to other packages), please share the URLs for the source. Links to GitHub, etc. are especially useful.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.
