Remote Backend Engineer - Wikidata Platform

Wikimedia Foundation; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 95,164 - 148,729; Full time

Job summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Software Engineer to join the Wikidata Platform, the structured data backbone of Wikimedia projects. Join a fully remote team and help scale Wikidata Query Service and related platform services used across Wikimedia and research communities.

You’ll work on backend engineering and operations, building production-grade services, ensuring performance, reliability, and maintainability, and contributing to the future of querying structured data.

Qualifications

• Backend or platform engineer with distributed systems experience.
• Understanding of knowledge graphs or related data tech.
• Proficiency in Java or C++, and ability to scale systems.
• Experience with production-grade services and SLOs.
• Familiar with observability tools and data processing pipelines.
• Strong collaboration and communication across teams.
• Willingness to learn and contribute to mission-driven culture.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs powering Wikidata’s query infrastructure.
• Integrate Wikidata Platform services with other Wikimedia systems.
• Develop features to ensure stability and scalability under growing usage.
• Monitor production systems and resolve bottlenecks.
• Support migrations and upgrades (triple stores, streaming ingestion).
• Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD, and instrumentation.
• Participate in code reviews and design discussions.
• Document systems and share knowledge with the team and community.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Knowledge graphs

Java

C++

SLOs

Observability tools

Data processing

Collaboration

Learning mindset

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Kafka

Job description

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Software Engineer to join the Wikidata Platform, the structured data backbone of Wikimedia projects. Join a fully remote team and help scale Wikidata Query Service and related platform services used across Wikimedia and research communities.

You’ll work on backend engineering and operations, building production-grade services, ensuring performance, reliability, and maintainability, and contributing to the future of querying structured data.