The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Wikidata Platform team, responsible for the structured data backbone of Wikimedia projects. This role involves technical leadership, people management, and strategic planning to develop and maintain the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and related platform services that support tools, research, and community workflows across the global open knowledge ecosystem.
What You'll Do
- Lead timely, high-quality engineering delivery for WDQS and related query platform services, including large-scale platform or data migrations involving multiple teams and stakeholders
- Ensure reliability, performance, and sustainability of existing and future query infrastructure
- Oversee planning activities including estimation, resource allocation, and work break-down, and balance roadmap work with maintenance needs
- Triage incoming issues, bugs, and operational incidents
- Develop and drive long-term engineering strategy for WDQS, including lifecycle management, architectural tradeoffs, and future planning
- Partner with SRE and other Foundation teams to ensure operational excellence and alignment across the data ecosystem
- Safeguard privacy, security, and data integrity across query services
- Provide technical input on system design, complexity, estimates, and feasibility
- Hire, onboard, mentor, and support the professional growth and performance of engineers on the Wikidata Platform team
- Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe culture
- Ensure healthy team processes and rituals, time management, and sustainable on-call practices
- Partner closely with the Product and Tech Leads to define roadmaps, priorities, work scopes, and deliver impactful outcomes
- Proactive dependency management—staying on top of the teams we depend on and the teams that depend on us
- Maintain strong, productive collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) product and engineering counterparts
- Communicate technical plans, risks, and progress clearly to internal teams, leadership, and external stakeholders
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of engineering management experience leading teams building API-driven or platform-level data services
- Experience collaborating closely with product and tech leads on software development teams that ship products with community input
- Experience building and operating large-scale, high-throughput products, with strong foundations in observability, incident response, runbook quality, and overall operational excellence
- Experience guiding software systems through their full lifecycle
- Strong people management skills including hiring, coaching, and performance management
- Experience working with data streams and data-intensive applications
- Experience navigating challenges related to privacy-sensitive data
- Ability to influence and drive results across multiple teams in a distributed organization
Nice to Have
- Experience with knowledge graphs or RDF/SPARQL
- Experience in open source, open data, or open knowledge communities
- Experience contributing to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects
Team & Environment
- Wikidata Platform team within the Wikimedia Foundation, working with Product and Tech Leads; collaborates with SRE, data teams, and Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE)
- Reports to the Director of Product
- Commitment to Wikimedia’s mission and values
- Comfort with ambiguity, incomplete information, and navigating complex environments
- Strong and proactive written communication skills in a highly asynchronous, globally distributed workplace
- Collaborative problem solving with empathy, emotional intelligence, and openness to diverse viewpoints
- Pragmatic software development approach grounded in curiosity, continuous learning, and long-term thinking
- Preference for achieving outcomes through influence, collaboration, and team empowerment
- Diverse and inclusive workforce
- Equitable and inclusive workplace
Benefits & Compensation
- Fully remote work environment
- Occasional travel required
- Working hours must overlap with UTC+1 to UTC−5 time zones
- Core overlapping team hours are 16:00–18:00 UTC
- Equal opportunity employer with commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity
- Remote-first organization with staff in 40+ countries
- Competitive, equitable, and values-aligned salary structure
- No consideration of applicant salary history
- Accommodations available for applicants with disabilities
- Access to U.S. benefits and perks (for U.S.-based hires)
Compensation: US$132,439 to US$208,378 annually for U.S.-based applicants; adjusted for cost of living and location for non-U.S. applicants.
Work Mode
- Fully remote with expectation of time zone overlap (UTC+1 to UTC−5); core collaboration hours 16:00–18:00 UTC
- Locations: United States (AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, IA, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NM, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, PR, RI, TN, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, WV, WI, WY), Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom
The Wikimedia Foundation is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other legally protected characteristics.
