Senior Backend Engineer - Wikidata Platform (Remote)

your Jared; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 117,000 - 181,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first work culture

Job summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Wikidata Platform team. You will help scale the Wikidata Query Service and related platform services powering tools, communities, and research across Wikimedia projects.

This remote-first role requires collaboration across UTC time zones to maintain overlap. You will design, build, and operate high-scale backend systems, contribute to CI/CD, and document architectures for an open knowledge ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer working on distributed systems or data platforms.
• Deep understanding of database and/or knowledge graph representation technologies and standards.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or other systems languages; ability to set up, scale, and investigate systems.
• Experience building and operating production-grade services with SLOs (high scalability, performance, reliability).
• Familiarity with modern observability tools (metrics, logging, tracing).
• Experience in data processing systems such as graph databases, search indexes, or data processing pipelines.
• Ability to communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Commitment to learning, resilience, and contributing to a mission-driven culture.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs that power Wikidata’s query infrastructure.
• Improve reliability, observability, and automation of the Wikidata Query Service and data pipelines.
• Integrate Wikidata Platform services with other systems and data sources across Wikimedia.
• Collaborate with SRE, data engineers, and product teams to ensure stability and scalability.
• Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents, and identify bottlenecks.
• Support platform migrations and system upgrades (e.g., triple stores, streaming ingestion).
• Contribute to deployment automation, CI/CD workflows, and service instrumentation.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical planning.
• Document systems and share knowledge with team members and Wikimedia’s technical community.

Skills

Backend engineering

Knowledge graphs

Systems languages

SLOs

Observability

Graph databases

Collaboration

Learning mindset

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

Flink

Job description

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Wikidata Platform team. You will help scale the Wikidata Query Service and related platform services powering tools, communities, and research across Wikimedia projects.

This remote-first role requires collaboration across UTC time zones to maintain overlap. You will design, build, and operate high-scale backend systems, contribute to CI/CD, and document architectures for an open knowledge ecosystem.