Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Summary The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to support and develop the platform serving the world’s favorite encyclopedia, Wikipedia, to millions of people around the globe. Wikimedia’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team is principally responsible for ensuring our global top-10 website and its underlying infrastructure are healthy and developing further in support of Wikimedia’s mission: to help everyone share in the sum of all knowledge. The SRE team at Wikimedia is a globally distributed and diverse team of engineers with a drive to explore, experiment, and embrace new technologies. We work in the open by publishing all of our documentation, code, and configuration as open source, and all our production systems are powered by open source software. We invite you to go through our documentation and code -- no login required. 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 websites, and you enjoy the idea of working in a remote-first role, we may just be the right place for you. You are responsible for:

• 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 (Puppet, Kubernetes)
• Leading continuous improvement by automating the installation, configuration, and maintenance of services on our platform
• Work closely with product teams, helping them bring scalable functionality to our users by assisting in the architectural design of new services and making them operate at scale
• Participating in a 24/7 on-call rotation shared across the broader SRE team. This includes taking part in incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure.
• Collaborating with a global, cross-functional team in an asynchronous communication environment
• Mentoring peers in your areas of technical and operational strength
• Ability and willingness to travel 1-2 times a year for in-person events and team meetings

Most importantly, share our values and work in accordance with them Skills and Experience:

• 6+ years of experience in an SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team
• Experience with shell and any scripting languages used in an SRE context (Python, Go, Bash, Ruby; we primarily use Python) and configuration management tools (Puppet, Ansible; we use Puppet)
• Experience with distributed caching systems, including their underlying algorithms and how to optimize their performance
• A thorough, protocol-level understanding of TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, and DNS
• Experience with package management on Linux systems (we use Debian)
• Strong Linux system-level troubleshooting skills
• History of automating tasks and processes, identifying process gaps, and finding automation opportunities
• Strong English language skills (verbal and written) and ability to work independently, as an effective part of a globally distributed team working across multiple time zones
• Experience leading and participating in incident response and post-incident review rituals, with the goal of conducting root cause analysis and implementing preventive measures.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience with high-performance HTTP(S) caching-proxy software such as HAProxy, Varnish (Vinyl), Apache Traffic Server, Envoy, or Nginx
• Experience with Linux kernel tuning for high-traffic loads
• Experience with the use, maintenance, and configuration of monitoring, metrics, and logging infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
• Developing/contributing to Free and Open Source software or being part of an open-source community (share your favourite pull requests!)
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis) -- MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
• Experience with defining cross-team SLOs and their implementation

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and 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 freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects; build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content; support volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible; 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 from millions worldwide. It is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization based in San Francisco.