Job Vacancies at Wikimedia Foundation

Summary

• The Sr. Strategic Partnerships Manager will play a crucial role in forming and deepening partnerships with the largest reusers of Wikimedia content (both Wikimedia Enterprise customers and largest prospective customers) and serve as their primary point of contact at WMF. The Sr. Strategic Partnerships Manager’s main focus will be leveraging partnerships with the largest reusers of Wikimedia content to advocate for the values and needs of the Wikimedia Movement while ensuring these partners have a positive experience working with the Foundation. To achieve this, they will also closely collaborate with internal WMF teams to identify opportunities to unlock reciprocal value from content reuse partnerships, increase the sustainability of the Wikimedia content lifecycle, and inform strategic decision-making and prioritization across the organization.
• The Sr. Strategic Partnerships Manager reports to the Senior Director, Earned Revenue. 

Responsibilities

• Form and deepen partnerships with the largest reusers of Wikimedia content.
• Represent WMF and the Movement's priorities to strategic partners, serve as their main point of contact, and provide them with a positive overall experience working with us. 
• Deepen key content reusers’ understanding of their role in the Wikimedia ecosystem to establish and safeguard sustainable distribution avenues for Wikimedia content.
• Generate insights and exercise judgment to evaluate which strategic partnerships could be developed into Wikimedia Enterprise (WME) relationships, when this could happen, and then support Wikimedia Enterprise with the ensuing negotiation and contracting processes.
• Collaborate closely with the WME product and customer service teams to ensure partners with commercial contracts have a cohesive relationship with the Foundation.
• Proactively identify, scope, and prioritize creative and effective ways to unlock reciprocal value from partners' reuse of Wikimedia content, such as commercial agreements, product collaborations, community growth initiatives, and legal or branding opportunities.
• Inform WMF teams about impactful partnership opportunities relevant to their priorities, and define and deliver on processes for facilitating the handover of specific projects while maintaining an informed advisory role.
• Serve as a resource for cross-departmental strategizing by independently uncovering insights about evolving third-party content reuse cases and market conditions.

Skills and Experience:

• Proven experience forming and managing high-level, multi-stakeholder partnerships in the technology and/or media industry.
• Strong understanding of the Wikimedia ecosystem and its content reuse landscape.
• Excellent communication and negotiation skills, with the ability to influence both internal and external stakeholders.
• Analytical mindset and the ability to uncover and independently analyze insights from partners, market conditions, and industry trends.
• A collaborative and proactive approach to working with cross-functional teams and the ability to evaluate opportunities and help set cross-departmental priorities. Problem-solving skills and flexibility to work cross-functionally and cross-culturally.
• Must be willing to travel domestically and internationally (roughly 15%-20% time) and work flexible hours to meet the requirements of global partner relationships.
• Typically requires a Bachelor’s + 5 years related exp; Master’s + 3 years related experience; or equivalent work experience.
• Additionally, we’d love it if you have:
• Experience working in an organization with a distributed workforce. Ability to collaborate across time zones in remote environments.
• Global perspective, with experience living or working internationally.
• Passion for the mission and values of the Wikimedia movement. 

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Summary

• The Senior Major Gift Officer is a critical part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising team, focused on raising major gifts and planned gifts for the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Endowment. 
• The Senior Major Gift Officer will report to and work closely with the Senior Manager of Major Gifts & Planned Giving to develop and execute major giving fundraising strategies. They manage a dynamic portfolio of major gift prospects, serving as one of our front-line major gifts fundraisers. Succeeding in this environment requires comfort with both highly personalized cultivation strategies for individual donors in their portfolio as well as email outreach to a broad array of donors at scale. 
• The Senior Major Gift Officer will work remotely. The ideal candidate will be located with convenient travel into US East Coast or West Coast major metros and travel frequently.  

You are responsible for:

• Serving as a front-line fundraiser on a team charged with securing annually increasing revenue targets through major gifts 
• Cultivating and stewarding a portfolio of 75-100 prospects who have the capacity to give between $1k-$25k annually, along with qualifying and disqualifying major donors from a large giving pool, with frequent reevaluation of the portfolio based on qualification meetings
• Soliciting and securing major and planned gifts in support of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Endowment, and building a pipeline for further giving and cultivation across our major gifts team 
• Fostering strong, life-long donor relationships, including those assigned based on geographic location or other factors 
• Developing intimate, high-end donor cultivation events, including building invitation lists, assisting with program content, and executing post-event cultivation strategies, in conjunction with the Events Manager.
• Creating written materials to support fundraising, including meeting/event briefings, activity reports, solicitation letters, proposals, and stewardship reports
• Managing a variety of major donor communications, including project management, writing, and editing of these pieces, in collaboration with other staff across the Foundation
• Participating in donor identification, research, and qualification efforts
• Assisting with gift processing, acknowledgements, donor recognition, and other gift administration tasks as needed
• Tracking your contact with donors in our donor database 

Skills and Experience:

• 4 years of successful fundraising experience, including at least 3 years of direct major gifts experience
• A record of personal success in raising money from individual major donors through current and planned gifts in the 4 to 5-figure range
• Broad-based knowledge of various development activities, including direct solicitations, event planning and management, and planned giving
• Excellent relationship management skills and the ability to work with a diverse group of donors and team members across geographies
• Excellent verbal communication skills
• Demonstrably strong writing skills
• Ability to work with a high degree of autonomy and accountability
• Ability to maintain confidentiality of donor information and a finely-tuned sense of discretion
• Ability to travel to meet with donors in person and attend Foundation gatherings
• Comfort and experience in a technology-driven environment
• Qualities that are important to us:
• A strong values and vision fit with the Wikimedia movement and Foundation.
• We are an international organization serving an internationally distributed audience. A strong international perspective with personal experience in cross-cultural communication is highly valued
• Articulate and persuasive communicator, both in speaking and writing
• Active listening and strategizing; comfortable receiving input from many sources, and able to act on information to develop increased support
• Detail-oriented, able to maintain systems, track progress, and follow-up in a timely fashion
• Sharing a culture of constructive criticism and respect
• Self-motivated professional who takes initiative and has the ability to work independently
• Gravitas and professionalism appropriate for interacting with high level donors, board members, and C-level staff
• The ideal candidate will be located with convenient travel into US East Coast or West Coast major metros and travel frequently

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience working in an organization with a timezone distributed workforce
• Experience working with technical and/or scientific donors
• Experience with endowment campaigns
• Experience in marketing and/or securing planned gifts
• Fluency in languages other than English

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 Summary

• The Wikimedia Foundation seeks a Movement Communications Specialist with a deep understanding of multilingual and multicultural storytelling and digital content creation. Reporting to the Manager, Movement Communications, you will be part of the Movement Communications team within the larger Communications Department. The Movement Communications team works to build trust and shared understanding between the Wikimedia Foundation and the over 300,000 Wikimedia volunteers and affiliate members around the world. Through this role, you will work to elevate and amplify the voices and stories of movement members, connecting them to the mission and celebrating their role in its success. 
• This is a highly collaborative role, with opportunities to impact the way that the Wikimedia Foundation is positioned within the larger free knowledge ecosystem. You will be in regular communication with movement members doing impactful work, as well as with Foundation staff leading on our organizational goals and priorities. You will be critical in aligning work, as well as communicating and coordinating for effective collaboration. You will lead and execute communications campaigns and events with our global audience, ensuring content and storytelling are consistent with the Foundation’s values, voice and tone. 
• Note: We are a global team that works closely with Wikimedia volunteers. We are looking for candidates based remotely in a timezone between UTC -7 to UTC +1 to be able to collaborate with colleagues and volunteers across time zones. See countries the Wikimedia Foundation can hire in below.

You are responsible for:

• Consistency: Building consistency and increasing discoverability and centralization of Foundation communications aimed at the movement.
• Storytelling: Conceiving of creative, accessible and translatable storytelling methods across a variety of different mediums and across a broad range of topics, from product development to governance to political advocacy and more.
• Connections: Connecting with movement members across cultures to understand how the Foundation can best support and showcase their work.
• Event organizing: Supporting the organizing of and communications around community events, including our global annual flagship event, Wikimania.
• Board communications: Supporting leadership, including the Board of Trustees and executives, in connecting with the movement through convenings and communications.
• Metrics: Measuring and reporting on success towards established goals.
• Team support: Supporting the larger Movement Communications team, as well as the Communications Department, on movement-facing communications.
• Any other work as delegated by the Movement Communications Team leadership.

Skills and Experience:

• 4+ years of experience in multicultural and multilingual communications.
• Experience building relationships with a range of stakeholders and delivering projects to meet diverse stakeholder needs.
• Background in journalism, community or political organizing, advocacy, mission-driven communications, or any similar field.
• Experience telling compelling stories across languages and cultures in a range of formats on a variety of topics.
• Experience with different forms of content creation, including graphics and basic audio and video content.
• Experience running large-scale virtual and in-person events.
• Fluency in at least one other language.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience of contributing to Wikimedia projects or editing wikis.
• Experience working in remote-first, globally distributed environments.

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About Job

• The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia and its sister projects, is seeking a deeply technical, outcome-oriented Director of Data to lead our work across data engineering, search, experimentation, and data-related site reliability engineering (SRE).
• Wikipedia is a top-ten website that serves audiences in over 300 languages and reaches over a billion people each month. Our data systems power everything from product analytics and machine learning to product features, community tools, and public datasets used by researchers worldwide. In this role, you’ll be accountable for shipping reliable, privacy-respecting data products and platforms and for maintaining a high technical bar of how we design, build, operate, and evolve them in the open.
• You’ll manage managers and principal ICs across multiple teams (Data Engineering, Search, Experimentation, and Data SRE). You’ll set clear, realistic roadmaps; focus on production-readiness; and provide strategic technical oversight while being comfortable unpacking and researching deep technical problems and solutions. You have enough experience to know what “good” looks like for petabyte-scale data lakes, event pipelines, and search and experimentation stacks, and scale the best practices for how we plan, build, and operate production systems.
• Please note: We will only consider hiring within UTC-8 to UTC+3 due to the geographical location of the team.

We’d like you to:

• Ship safely and incrementally. Drive the work across data engineering, search, experimentation, and data SRE in close partnership with product management to align technical execution with user needs and priorities. Balance velocity with reliability, involving stakeholders both inside Wikimedia and the larger volunteer community. 
• Develop people and teams. Manage managers, coach senior ICs, scale hiring for a diverse, international, remote-first organization, and foster a collaborative, mission-aligned culture.
• Provide technical strategy and oversight. Set architectural direction grounded in experience with event-based architectures, data ingestion, modeling, freshness/accuracy SLOs, data governance, privacy by design principles, and cost efficiency.
• Partner effectively with Product Management. Collaborate with our Group Product Manager for Data Platform and senior PMs to balance technical implementation with diverse user needs. Navigate priority trade-offs through healthy debate and shared accountability.
• Be an operational multiplier. Identify and share patterns across teams that reduce toil and let ICs focus on what they do best.

You are:

• Deeply technical with strong judgment. You can read design docs and PRs, spot missing edge cases or constraints, and make calls grounded in industry best practice.
• Biased towards shipping regularly and with confidence. You break work into safe, incremental releases with a crisp definition of done, unblock teams quickly, and measure outcomes.
• Operationally focused. You set and hold SLOs/error budgets, collaborate with stakeholders, manage vendor relationships, and treat incidents as opportunities to automate and harden systems.
• Collaborative across functions. You build strong partnerships with product management, research, analytics, and product teams to achieve shared outcomes.
• Mission driven. You balance product impact with privacy and transparency, partnering with volunteers to build in the open for a global, multilingual community.

Skills and Experience:

• 8+ years of engineering leadership with 3+ years managing managers across data-heavy backend teams (or an equivalent track record of shipping production data systems at internet scale).
• Track record of shipping production data systems at massive scale.
• Hands-on experience with relevant open source tech stacks (e.g. Kubernetes, Kafka, Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Ceph, Airflow).
• Ability to hire, coach, and lead globally distributed teams.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• A track record of open source participation.
• Fluency or familiarity with languages in addition to English.
• Experience as a member of a volunteer community.

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 Summary

• We’re hiring a Staff Database Administrator to support and protect the sum of all human knowledge, shared by Wikipedia and its sister projects.Much of that knowledge is stored using MariaDB, and therefore we’re looking for someone with a strong expertise in designing, operating and optimizing relational (SQL) database infrastructure at large scale (MariaDB and other MySQL derivatives in particular), to support and scale the technology behind Wikipedia and its sister projects—some of the most visited websites on the internet.
• Our work powers the daily experiences of hundreds of millions of users. You'll have the opportunity to learn, take on new challenges, and make a tangible difference on a global scale. As a Staff DBA you will be responsible for the health of our database systems and the products and services that depend on them - including their availability and performance. You’ll join the SRE Data Persistence team, a small, high-impact team responsible for Wikimedia’s production storage & retrieval systems and infrastructure, part of a larger sub-department of Site Reliability Engineers in Product & Technology.

You are responsible for:

• 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

Skills and Experience:

• 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  

Additionally, we’d love it if you 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