Senior Software Engineer, iOS (Contract)

Wikimedia Foundation; Iowa City (IA); Remote; USD 96,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, iOS to join the App Growth team within the Core Experiences engineering group on a 3-month full-time contract. You will drive medium-scale iOS initiatives, design components, and raise the bar for performance and accessibility across the multilingual Wikipedia app while collaborating with product, design, and analytics teams.

This is a remote-first role requiring daily overlap with 14:00–21:00 UTC to align with the team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional iOS development experience.
• Strong knowledge of Swift, SwiftUI and UIKit.
• Experience with performance optimization and accessibility.

Responsibilities

• Deliver medium complexity initiatives from technical discovery through delivery.
• Lead design of scalable, accessible iOS components for a global audience.
• Collaborate with product, design, analysts and native engineers to align outcomes.

Skills

Swift

SwiftUI

UIKit

iOS architecture patterns

Performance optimization

Self-driven

Communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

CS/STEM degree

Tools

MediaWiki

WordPress

Drupal

Job description

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, iOS to join the App Growth team within the Core Experiences engineering group on a 3-month full time contract.The App Growth team has a clear and ambitious goal: make the apps the destination for knowledge lovers and grow our active readership. The team owns the cross-platform feature framework for the app, making decisions about where a feature lives when the app is the destination and where its primary value is unlocked.

Important: We are a fully remote team at a global organization. To ensure there are enough opportunities to communicate, this role needs at least four hours of your work day to occur between 14:00 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 iOS. 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.

Prioritization

• 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 prioritize 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 iOS applications.
• Strong professional experience and proficiency with Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, and familiarity with architectural patterns in iOS.
• Experience of iOS 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’d 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