Senior Backend Engineer, Wikidata Platform — Remote

Wikimedia Foundation; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 116,633 - 181,243; Full time

Job summary

Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support the Wikidata Platform, focusing on backend systems, production-grade services, and scalable architectures. You will work with SRE and data engineers to ensure reliability, performance, and maintainability, helping to shape the future of structured, linked data.

The role emphasizes collaboration across technical and product teams, with a strong operations ownership mindset and contributions to deployment automation and

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 is important.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems and APIs that power Wikidata’s query infrastructure.
• 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 under growing usage.
• Monitor production systems, respond to operational incidents, and proactively identify and resolve 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 broader technical community.

Skills

Distributed systems

Knowledge graphs

Java

C++

Observability tooling

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support the Wikidata Platform, focusing on backend systems, production-grade services, and scalable architectures. You will work with SRE and data engineers to ensure reliability, performance, and maintainability, helping to shape the future of structured, linked data.

The role emphasizes collaboration across technical and product teams, with a strong operations ownership mindset and contributions to deployment automation and