Remote: Senior Backend Engineer — Wikidata Platform

Wikimedia Foundation; United States; On-site; USD 116,633 - 181,243; Full time

Job summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support the Wikidata Platform and the Wikidata Query Service. This role combines backend engineering and operations ownership to deliver scalable, production-grade services for Wikimedia projects and the broader open knowledge ecosystem.

You will work with SRE, data engineers, and product teams to ensure reliability, performance, and maintainability while aligning with a mission-driven engineering culture.

Qualifications

• 5+ years as a backend or platform engineer on distributed systems or data platforms.
• Deep understanding of database/knowledge graph technologies and standards.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or other systems languages; ability to scale and investigate.
• Experience building production-grade services with SLOs and non-functional concerns.
• Familiarity with modern observability tools (metrics, logging, tracing).
• Experience with data processing systems like graph databases, search indexes, or pipelines.
• Strong communication across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Commitment to learning and mission-driven engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs powering Wikidata’s query infrastructure.
• Improve reliability, observability, and automation of WDQS and data pipelines.
• Integrate Wikimedia platform services with other systems and data sources.
• Collaborate with SRE, data engineers, and product teams for stability and scalability.
• Monitor production systems and respond to incidents.
• Support platform migrations and upgrades (triple stores, streaming ingestion).
• Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD, and service instrumentation.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and planning.
• Document systems and share knowledge within Wikimedia’s technical community.

Skills

Backend engineer

Knowledge graphs

Java/C++

SLOs/Observability

Data processing

Cross-functional collaboration

Learning mindset

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

Flink

Job description

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support the Wikidata Platform and the Wikidata Query Service. This role combines backend engineering and operations ownership to deliver scalable, production-grade services for Wikimedia projects and the broader open knowledge ecosystem.

You will work with SRE, data engineers, and product teams to ensure reliability, performance, and maintainability while aligning with a mission-driven engineering culture.