The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia and its sister projects, is seeking a Staff Database Administrator to ensure the health, performance, and scalability of its production relational database systems. This role is critical in maintaining the infrastructure that powers one of the world’s most visited websites.
What You'll Do
- Ensure the health and performance of Wikimedia’s production relational database systems, and the structural integrity of its data.
- Deploy, maintain and troubleshoot relational database systems in production, development and staging environments
- Design, implement, manage and automate (multi-site) replication topologies
- Consult in the design of database schemas and queries, and implement/oversee database schema changes in production
- Monitor, debug and optimize database query performance
- Improve observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
- Capacity and infrastructure planning, including (on-prem) bare-metal hardware
- Contribute to the automation of common database management workflows
- Enable the reliable generation and timely restoration of database backups
- Maintain relationships with the MariaDB upstream projects/organizations, and working with upstream developers on bug identification and resolution
- Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation shared across the team - taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure.
- You share our values and guiding principles, and work in accordance with them
What We're Looking For
- Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database, including complex replication topologies at scale
- Advanced proficiency in SQL and query/schema optimization
- Experience with debugging query performance and schema design
- Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations
- Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling
- Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)
- 6+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team
- Solid English language skills
- Ability to travel 1-2 times a year
- Ability to work independently in a fast paced environment, as an effective part of a globally distributed team, including ticket tracking systems and asynchronous communication tools
- B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science, or equivalent work experience
Nice to Have
- Proficiency at automation/programming/scripting (Python) and standard software development practices
- Experience with SRE practices and tooling, including configuration management & orchestration strongly preferred.
- Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis) - MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
- Experience with other advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.) is a plus
- Strong track record of open source contributions is a major plus
Technical Stack
- MariaDB
- MySQL
- SQL
- Linux
- Python
- LAMP stack
- PHP
- HHVM
- memcached
- Redis
- Swift
- Ceph
- Cassandra
- configuration management tools
- orchestration tools
Team & Environment
- Part of the SRE Data Persistence team, within a larger sub-department of Site Reliability Engineers in Product & Technology
- Small, high-impact team
Benefits & Compensation
- Remote-first organization with staff in 40+ countries
- Competitive, equitable, and values-aligned salary
- Multiple individualized factors including cost of living determine offered pay
- Salaries adjusted for country of hire
- No consideration of salary history
- Compensation based on skills, experience, and location
- Equal opportunity employer with inclusive and equitable workplace
- Diverse workforce encouraged to apply
- Accommodations available for applicants with disabilities
- U.S. Benefits & Perks (specifics not detailed but implied)
- Salary: US$134,133 to US$208,254 annually for U.S.-based applicants; adjusted for country of hire outside the U.S.
Work Mode
- Remote-first organization; ability to work independently in a globally distributed team with asynchronous communication
- Locations: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, 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 that values diversity 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.
