Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Service Operations)

Summary

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to directly support our application platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopædia to millions of people around the globe. Wikipedia and its sister projects are powered strictly by Free and Open Source software with MediaWiki in its core surrounded by an ecosystem of microservices in PHP, NodeJS, Python, Go and Java.

We are a distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment and embrace new technologies. During the past few years we have been transitioning our platform from a monolith to a hybrid, microservices architecture, and started migrating our microservices onto Kubernetes. We’ve adopted Elastic Stack and Prometheus as our de facto logging and monitoring platforms and are improving our automation (we ❤️  automation).

If you find what we do interesting, if you are up to the challenge of improving the reliability and delivery of one of the Internet’s top 10 websites, and you enjoy the idea of working with a globally distributed team, you might be just the person we need. Come as you are!

Responsibilities

Performing day-to-day operational/DevOps tasks on Wikimedia’s public facing infrastructure (deployment, maintenance, configuration, troubleshooting)
Implementing and utilizing configuration management and deployment tools for Kubernetes
Assisting in the architectural design of new services and making them operate at scale
Monitoring of systems, services and service clusters, optimization of performance and resource utilization
Assisting in or lead incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
Share our values and work in accordance with them
Qualifications
3+ years experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team
Experience with managing geographically distributed, highly available, high traffic infrastructure based on Kubernetes
Experience with the use, maintenance and configuration of monitoring, metrics and logging observability infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana, Icinga/Nagios,  Graphite, etc.)
Comfortable with shell and scripting languages used in an SRE/Operations engineering context (Python, Go, Bash, Ruby, etc.)
Experience with managing container based systems, including software and service deployment and package management
Comfortable with managing bare-metal servers, virtualized environments and package management
Comfortable  with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, etc.)
Aptitude for automation and streamlining of tasks
Strong English language skills and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team
B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
Pluses
Experience in using and running source code control and CI/CD systems at scale
Track record of open source contributions is a major plus
Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP, memcached/Redis, MySQL) – MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
Low level systems troubleshooting and debugging (CPU/memory profiling, C/C++ experience, in-depth Linux knowledge)
Experience with advanced distributed storage (Swift, Ceph, etc) and database systems (Mysql, Postgres, Cassandra, etc.)
These are some of our upcoming projects you might be working on soon…
We are migrating the MediaWiki application to our internal Kubernetes platform and in the process are decomposing it into smaller, functional parts
At the same time we are making application deployments faster and more reliable to help our developers (both internal to the foundation and the volunteers) to see the fruits of their labor faster
Of course we are directly responsible for the  smooth and reliable operation of the MediaWiki application server platform and its dependencies (Memcached, etcd, kubernetes, …)
Our platform continues to grow and we are constantly implementing and improving existing orchestration and automation tooling to eliminate toil and to act as an enabler for the entire SRE team
We are also involved in keeping Wikimedia’s infrastructure secure in our high-velocity environment with staff and volunteers across the world
The Wikimedia Foundation is…

…the nonprofit organization that hosts and 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, free of interference. We host 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. The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive financial support from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or (415) 839-6885.

U.S. Benefits & Perks*

Fully paid medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and their eligible families (yes, fully paid premiums!)
The Wellness Program provides reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, baby sitting, continuing education and much more
The 401(k) retirement plan offers matched contributions at 4% of annual salary
Flexible and generous time off – vacation, sick and volunteer days, plus 22 paid holidays – including the last week of the year.
Family friendly! 100% paid new parent leave for seven weeks plus an additional five weeks for pregnancy, flexible options to phase back in after leave, fully equipped lactation room.
For those emergency moments – long and short term disability, life insurance (2x salary) and an employee assistance program
Pre-tax savings plans for health care, child care, elder care, public transportation and parking expenses
Telecommuting and flexible work schedules available
Appropriate fuel for thinking and coding (aka, a pantry full of treats) and monthly massages to help staff relax
Great colleagues – diverse staff and contractors speaking dozens of languages from around the world, fantastic intellectual discourse, mission-driven and intensely passionate people
*Please note that for remote roles located outside of the U.S., we defer to our PEO to ensure alignment with local labor laws.