Senior Software Engineer, Android (Contract)

Wikimedia Foundation; Iowa City (IA); Remote; USD 56,000 - 87,000; Full time

Job summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Android to advance the App Experience and App Growth teams within the Core Experiences group. This fully remote role requires a daily overlap window between 15:00 and 21:00 UTC to facilitate communication across global teams.

You will design, implement, and optimize Android features for a multilingual audience, collaborating with product, design, and analytics to deliver high-quality experiences that scale and remain accessible.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and 5–10+ years of Android app experience.
• Strong proficiency with Kotlin, XML, Jetpack Compose.
• Experience with Android performance optimization.
• Experience working in a lean, self-driven environment.

Responsibilities

• Delivery of medium complexity initiatives from discovery through delivery; break down into features and manage scope.
• Improve mobile Wikipedia product experiences for a global multilingual audience on Android; lead system design for medium-sized projects.
• Build software that is easy to test, observe, and debug; instrument features for analytics.

Skills

Kotlin

XML

Jetpack Compose

Android development

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related

Job description

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Android to support the App Experience and App Growth teams within the Core Experiences engineering group.

Our teams have a clear and ambitious goal: make our apps the destination for knowledge lovers and grow our active readership.

Availability

It’s important to state that we are a fully remote team at a global organisation. To ensure there are enough opportunities to communicate, this role needs at least four hours of your workday to occur between 15:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC.

You are responsible for:

Delivery and enablement

• Delivery of medium complexity initiatives from technical discovery through delivery. Breaks down initiatives into features, drive estimation and manage scope. Identifies risks early, and helps the team make pragmatic tradeoffs across quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact.

Implementation

• Improving the mobile Wikipedia product experiences that serve a global, multilingual audience on Android. Leads system design for medium-sized projects and can design and build accessible, adaptable, scalable components.

Quality, testing and observability

• Consistently builds software that is easy to test, observe and debug. Instruments features that enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts.

Cross-functional collaboration

• Partners with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to shape pragmatic solutions that balance user needs, technical constraints, platform expectations, and delivery timelines.

Prioritisation

• Proactively identifies high-impact technical opportunities and risks across the engagement timeframe, works with the team to clarify priorities and sequencing. Actively keeps the team aligned on outcomes, capacity, and shared goals.

Culture and standards

• Complies with team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making - fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration.

Operational Awareness

• Plans work with awareness of downstream or upstream effects.

Qualities that are important to us:

Clear communicator

You can explain your ideas simply and adapt your communication to different audiences across engineering, product, and non-technical audiences in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.

Autonomy

Operates with high autonomy in a team setting and cross-team settings. You own your work end-to-end and practice a culture of responsibility and follow-through.

Feedback

You give and receive feedback with curiosity and empathy. Helps others resolve misunderstandings productively.

Builds strong relationships

Proactively brings the right people into discussions, identifies process improvements.

Comfortable with ambiguity

You are comfortable with ambiguity and can collaborate to solve complex problems with pragmatic solutions. Connects ideas and can regularly balance trade-offs across related domains to create well-rounded solutions.

Knowledge sharing

Strong knowledge-sharing practices, documents work for handover and consistently helps others understand and apply shared knowledge. You enjoy working with others to solve problems and are open to feedback. You inspire trust and progress through support, example, and thoughtful contributions.

Outcome-oriented

You prioritise work that delivers value to users and aligns with organizational goals. You balance ideal solutions with the constraints of legacy, user expectations and delivery needs.

Requirements

• Bachelor's and 5-10+ years related professional experience with significant experience building Android applications
• Strong professional experience and proficiency with Kotlin, XML, Jetpack Compose, and familiarity with architectural patterns in Android
• Experience of Android performance optimisation techniques to ensure smooth, responsive, and high-performing applications under a variety of conditions.
• Experience working in a self-driven, lean environment
• Commitment to the Foundation's Mission and Values

Additionally, we would love it if you have:

• Experience adding webview-wrapped experiences to existing native mobile apps (iOS or Android)
• Experience in maintaining cross-platform mobile applications.
• Experience building mobile games or other interactive mobile experiences.
• Experience with data science, machine learning, and/or AI (e.g., familiarity with prompt engineering, Jupyter notebooks experience, etc.)
• Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress)
• Experience with leveraging agentic coding to scale the work of small engineering teams.
• Bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, management information systems, or STEM field (or equivalent certification)
• Prior experience with MediaWiki or Wikimedia projects.
• A history of open source contributions

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries

Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$56.07 to US$87.13 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location.

Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following:US States

Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming (US Territory or Federal District)

Countries

Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR) and must have current work authorization in their location. (citizens/permanent residents only)

We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements.

All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.