In A Nutshell
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Software Engineer to join the team supporting the Wikidata Platform — the structured data backbone of Wikimedia projects and a key part of the global open knowledge ecosystem. You’ll help scale and sustain the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and related platform services that power tools, features, communities, and research efforts across Wikimedia projects and beyond.
Responsibilities
- Help design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs that power Wikidata’s query infrastructure
- Improve reliability, observability, and automation of the Wikidata Query Service and data pipelines
- Integrate Wikidata Platform services with other systems and data sources across Wikimedia
- Develop features and capabilities to ensure stability and scalability under growing usage
- Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents and resolve bottlenecks
- Support platform migrations and system upgrades (e.g., triple stores, streaming ingestion)
- Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD workflows, and service instrumentation
- Participate in code reviews and design discussions,
- Document systems and share knowledge with team members and Wikimedia’s broader technical community
Skillset
- 2+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms
- Solid understanding of database and/or knowledge graph representation technologies
- Proficiency in Java, C++, or other systems languages. Ability to set up, scale, and investigate systems is more important than expertise in a particular language.
- Experience building and operating production-grade services with SLOs – good appreciation of scalability, performance, reliability and other non-functionals
- Familiarity with modern observability tools (metrics, logging, tracing)
- Familiarity with data processing technologies such as graph databases, search indexes, or data processing pipelines
- Ability to work collaboratively across disciplines and communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences
- A commitment to learning, resilience, and contributing to a mission-driven engineering culture
