Software Engineer III (Anti-Harassment Tools Team) at Wikimedia Foundation

Summary

• The Anti-Harassment Tools Team at Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Software Engineer to work with us to build features that help identify and stop harassment on all of our Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia.
• This role is full-time, 100% remote, and global.
• The Anti-Harassment Tools Team is an interdisciplinary product team developing tools that help administrators and staff in their efforts to combat these people who would use our projects to harm civil discourse, the integrity of the content, or other users of our projects.
• This includes some light data analysis tools and some enforcement tools.
• We are seeking a software engineer to join us in this fight to protect our users and our projects. Stopping harassment on our projects is a pillar of our Foundation’s strategy and planning for the future.
• This is important, highly visible work. Currently, we are working on a broad set of tools related to user privacy and protection.
• You can see more details in our backlog or the community discussion of our latest epic.
• Your daily work will include contributing new patches or pull requests for existing features, generating requirements and prototypes for new features, estimating new work, collaborating with a designer, or helping a volunteer engineer get their code shaped up.
• The team is fully staffed with a Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Product Designer, Research Analyst, Data Analyst, Community Liaison, Test Engineer, and several Software Engineers, of course.
• Because of the sensitive nature of the tools we build, our work is highly collaborative and heavily tested.
• We interact with database administrators, security engineers, and other teams on a regular basis.
• We use open-source tools as much as possible, and always open-source our own work (check out our main Github repository, our documentation, and some good tasks for new contributors).
• Being an engineer at the Foundation requires being comfortable researching and learning an old codebase, so it involves reading documentation frequently.
• The codebase is so complex that it’s impossible to keep everything in your head at all times.
• PHP and JavaScript make up most of our code, but we value using the right tool for the job.
• Developers at the Foundation have autonomy and responsibility and can have a large and immediate impact on the future of the site and the movement.
• Our world is vast and can be complicated, so we value communication, enthusiasm, and eagerness to learn as much as certificates or degrees.

Responsibilities
You are responsible for:

• Develop, test, and deploy new features, improvements and upgrades to various systems and tools used by administrators and staff
• Work with Foundation staff and volunteers on software design, development, testing and evaluation of potential technical solutions
• Ensure positive and constructive discussions with the community and the Foundation
• Work and communicate effectively within a small team distributed across multiple time zones

Qualifications, Skills and Experience
Qualities that are important to us:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related fields or the equivalent in work-related experience
• Education and/or experience with Object-Oriented development using a scripting language (such as PHP, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript). Most of our work is in PHP and JavaScript
• Interest in front-end web application development skills
• Openness to working with a diverse and geographically distributed team
• Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happen online.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:
In addition to the basic skills needed for being successful, these skills could set you apart from the pack:

• Experience with MediaWiki development or as a contributor to Wikimedia projects
• Experience with legacy codebases and/or experience in free/open-source software development experience is highly welcome
• Experience with unit testing and integration testing and agile methodologies
• Understanding of the free culture movement
• Experience with machine learning or AI technologies
• Experience with online community moderation or anti-harassment tools.