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Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team

Wikimedia Foundation

Fully Remote
Remote
South Africa
US hours

Hirezar Summary for South African Applicants

This fully remote full time position at Wikimedia Foundation explicitly welcomes applicants based in South Africa. As a remote position, you can work from anywhere in South Africa — whether you're based in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, or a smaller town.

Job Description

<p><strong>Senior Software Engineer, MediaWiki Content Platform Team<br></strong></p>
<p><strong>Summary</strong></p>
<p>The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join our team, reporting to engineering management. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for engineering software that supports our product user experiences. In this role, you will work in a fully-remote environment (with occasional travel for team, department, or organization events), where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to write <a href="https://github.com/wikimedia">open source code</a> for collaborative experiences supporting well over half a billion pages accessed per day, and you get to do it at a place that believes we're all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.</p>
<p>On the Content Platform team, we work to support and evolve all things <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext">wikitext</a>, the markup language behind Wikipedia. We aim to make wikitext easier to write, faster to parse, and less error-prone for humans. We also strive to support editing and content analysis tools with structured representations. We also maintain the web services associated with content rendering and transformation.</p>
<p>In this role, you will work in a mostly-remote environment. To ensure there are enough opportunities to communicate, the preferred timezone for this candidate will be GMT-4 to GMT+2.</p>
<p><strong>You are responsible for:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Designing and delivering improvements to Wikipedia's wikitext processing infrastructure, balancing user experience, performance, backwards compatibility, and maintainability</li>
<li>Iterating on new features through collaboration with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, client teams, and community members</li>
<li>Writing PHP and JavaScript which supports hundreds of world languages</li>
<li>Creating and maintaining internet APIs with server scripting languages</li>
<li>Instrumenting components to monitor feature and quality characteristics</li>
<li>Leveraging caching and persistence technologies</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Skills and experience:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>5+ years of related professional experience in software engineering</li>
<li>Experience with one or more of: parser generators, interpreters, language runtimes, compilers, or bringing a language feature through a product cycle</li>
<li>Demonstrated ability to own complex technical projects from problem definition through implementation and delivery, including making and communicating architectural decisions and navigating ambiguity</li>
<li>Experience designing and maintaining reliable, performant software components used by other teams, products, or large numbers of users</li>
<li>Strong engineering practices: you enjoy writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and balancing architectural tradeoffs</li>
<li>Ability to work effectively across team and organizational boundaries, identify and resolve technical dependencies, and bring projects to completion with limited direction</li>
<li>Experience mentoring other engineers and raising the technical quality of a team, through code reviews, design discussions, documentation, or direct mentorship</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Qualities that are important to us:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access</li>
<li>An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels</li>
<li>Self motivated with an ability to navigate through ambiguity and bring a project to completion with limited direction</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Additionally, we'd love it if you have this:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Familiarity with the HTML5 spec and DOM manipulation</li>
<li>Expertise in Node.js and related technologies</li>
<li>Familiarity with Wikipedia/wikitext/markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress). We grow and care for MediaWiki and Wikimedia specific services. MediaWiki is an open source, PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript web application that powers Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation websites. It has been incrementally developed for many years to become a richly featured wiki engine and the basis for hundreds of extensions and skins, and has a vibrant volunteer community.</li>
<li>A history of open source contribution</li>
<li>Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, software engineering, or other STEM field (or equivalent certification)</li>
</ul>
<h4>About the Wikimedia Foundation</h4>
<p>The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that 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 eve

Tips for South African Applicants

Timezone Advantage

South Africa (SAST, UTC+2) overlaps well with European business hours and has a few hours of overlap with US East Coast. Mention your timezone flexibility in your application.

Salary in Context

Even without a listed salary, international remote roles typically pay 2-3x more than equivalent local positions in South Africa due to the exchange rate advantage.

Application Tips

Tailor your CV to international standards — use a clean format, highlight remote work experience, and include your English proficiency. Many SA applicants succeed by emphasising their strong work ethic and cultural adaptability.

Load Shedding Preparedness

If you're applying for a remote role, having a backup power solution (UPS, inverter, or generator) and mobile data as a backup internet connection shows employers you're prepared for South Africa's infrastructure challenges.

About Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation is a company in the Advancement industry that hires remote workers from South Africa. They currently have 11 open positions on Hirezar. View all Wikimedia Foundation jobs →