Tech Lead, Wikidata Platform

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a collaborative technical lead to guide the sustainment, development, and evolution of the query platform for Wikidata, one of the world's largest open linked databases. Wikidata facilitates much of the structure of Wikipedia content and contributor activities, making an impact on billions of users across 300+ languages. It also is a critical resource for libraries, universities, and other technology platforms. Our vision is a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge. This includes access to data for editing workflow support, research, feature development, and advancing artificial intelligence responsibly. As the Technical Lead for Wikidata Platform, you will shape the future of how users query and access Wikidata at scale. You will guide the short- and long-term technical vision and architecture for Wikidata Platform to maintain stable, reliable and sustainable data access. The Technical Lead shares responsibility with the Staff Product Manager and Engineering Manager for the delivery, development, and operations of Wikidata platform products and services. This role is an individual contributor role, reporting to the Director of Product, Abstract Wikipedia and Wikidata Platform. Wikidata application product strategy and development is primarily led and resourced by our affiliate organization, Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE), so this role will also work closely with WMDE product management and engineering counterparts. The Technical Lead will join the Product and Technology organization at Wikimedia, working alongside product teams building and operating features, products, platforms, and services used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. This is an opportunity to do good while improving and increasing the impact of the Wikidata platform for one of the top 15 websites in the world. In this role, you will lead the design, development, and deployment of Wikidata's query platform architecture. You will collaborate with the Staff Product Manager to ship platform services and features to serve technical contributors and users of Wikidata, deliver on user needs, and guide Wikidata query services to meet growth in data and demand. Our engineering environment includes open source applications developed in-house and off-the-shelf, with a wide variety of technologies and stack components, hosted primarily in colocated data centers. A highly successful candidate will also serve as a thought partner to the Vice President and Director of Product, and to affiliate partners on strategic and tactical roadmap development. This is a remote position; open to candidates residing in a range of different locations in the world. Some travel required.

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.