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
Requirements
- 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
Nice to Have
- Experience working with knowledge graphs or RDF/SPARQL
- Familiarity with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink)
- Comfort with CI/CD pipelines and containerization tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience in open source or open knowledge communities
- Familiarity with Wikimedia technologies, Wikidata, or MediaWiki
Work Arrangement
Remote (Worldwide)
Additional Information
- We are a fully remote team.
- Your working hours will need to overlap with UTC+1 to UTC-5 time zones to accommodate members of your team around the world.
- Team's overlapping hours are 14:00 UTC to 17:00 UTC.
