Senior Software Engineer (Privacy)

Summary The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Product Safety and Integrity team and build new security features to protect Wikipedia and our other projects. This is a very hands-on engineering role, working alongside a team of engineers and product managers to design and implement new features to protect and reassure our users and to ensure the platform remains resilient against attacks. You are a seasoned software engineer with experience building security features in large-scale systems. You understand the importance of testing and documentation, and common pitfalls in developing secure web applications. You have a passion for the WMF mission. We operate in a highly transparent manner, and the work we do touches thousands of editors every day. You will be working primarily on our MediaWiki platform which powers Wikipedia. As a top 10 website, we must meet stringent performance standards while addressing new security challenges such as supporting modern authentication technologies, detecting and preventing platform abuse from bots, and planning and rolling out improvements to our security architecture by defending against emerging threats. You are responsible for:

Helping design, develop, and deliver security features, with safety and security in mind
Working with other engineering teams to ensure that they make safe and compliant architectural and implementation choices
Leading by example in code review, decision-making, and team culture — fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration
Developing, reviewing, and deploying security features developed by the Foundation and community members
Conducting internal and external security and privacy reviews
Performing maintenance and addressing technical debt in security and privacy-critical components
Providing support for application security and privacy incidents and operations

Skills and Experience: We value the right mindset and potential over a checklist of specific experiences, and these are the traits we’ve identified that make great additions to our team so far.

5+ years of experience as a software engineer, ideally with focus on security or privacy
Ability to work effectively in a modern web application – ours is mostly PHP and JavaScript
Deep PHP experience isn’t required, if you have enough experience in engineering, and back-end web development, to learn it and be useful
Driving technical quality and operational excellence by defining and reinforcing standards in testing, observability, and system reliability;
Comfortably and autonomously creating proofs of concept, writing design documents, and breaking down complex projects into actionable tasks to support less experienced team members
Experience in developing secure software or security and privacy-related product features
A strong interest in working with a talented security team and learning more specialist security skills such as exploiting and mitigating application-level vulnerabilities
Ability to explain complex security issues and their implications on privacy and risk to non-technical audiences
Sensitivity to the security and privacy challenges faced by participants in a large, international project
Experience working in a remote distributed team

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

Experience working on anti-abuse mechanisms, such as detecting bots or coordinated activity
Previous experience building security countermeasures against attacks on technologies at the web backend database level
Experience finding fixing security bugs reviewing code for security gaps
A working knowledge of threat modeling secure design patterns privacy by design
Prior experience with MediaWiki or Wikimedia projects
Contributions to open-source software

About the Wikimedia Foundation: The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia 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 potential contribute something shared knowledge everyone should be able access knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia Wikimedia projects build software experiences reading contributing sharing Wikimedia content support volunteer communities partners who make Wikimedia possible advocate policies enable Wikimedia free knowledge thrive. The Wikimedia Foundation is charitable not-for-profit organization relies donations. We receive donations millions individuals around world average donation about $15 also receive donations institutional grants gifts The Wikimedia Foundation United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization offices San Francisco California USA. As equal opportunity employer Wikimedia Foundation values having diverse workforce continuously strives maintain inclusive equitable workplace encourage people diverse range backgrounds apply do not discriminate any person based upon race traits historically associated race religion color national origin sex pregnancy related medical conditions parental status sexual orientation gender identity gender expression age status protected veteran status individual disability genetic information any other legally protected characteristics. The Wikimedia Foundation remote-first organization staff members including contractors based 40+ countries Salaries at Wikimedia Foundation set way competitive equitable consistent values culture anticipated annual pay range position applicants based within United States US$113082 US$175725 multiple individualized factors including cost living location determinants offered pay applicants located outside US pay range adjusted country hire neither ask nor take into consideration salary history applicants compensation successful applicant based skills experience location. Please note currently able hire following countries: Australia Austria Bangladesh Belgium Brazil Canada Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Czech Republic Denmark Egypt Estonia Finland France Germany Ghana Greece India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Kenya Mexico Netherlands Nigeria Peru Poland Singapore South Africa Spain Sweden Switzerland Uganda United Kingdom United States America Uruguay Our non-US employees hired through local third party Employer Record EOR.