Senior Software Engineer - MediaWiki Content Platform Team

About the Role

This opportunity is with a partner company seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join their MediaWiki Content Platform team based in Australia. The role is fully remote and involves contributing to the technology underlying one of the largest global sources of open knowledge.

The successful candidate will work on evolving the wikitext infrastructure that powers collaborative editing and content experiences in hundreds of languages. This position blends advanced software engineering with enhancing performance, usability, reliability, and maintainability at a massive scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement enhancements to a large-scale wikitext processing infrastructure while balancing user experience, performance, compatibility, and maintainability.
• Own technically complex projects from initial problem definition through architecture, coding, testing, and production deployment.
• Collaborate effectively with engineers, product managers, designers, client teams, and community contributors to refine features and solve challenges.
• Develop and sustain PHP and JavaScript software supporting content delivery across numerous languages.
• Create and maintain dependable internet-facing APIs utilizing suitable server-side technologies.
• Build and refine components that are highly performant, maintainable, and widely used by various teams and products.
• Implement instrumentation to monitor system performance, quality, and feature behavior.
• Improve scalability and responsiveness of content services through caching and persistence methods.
• Make architectural decisions while handling ambiguity and managing competing technical trade-offs.
• Promote strong engineering standards through unit and integration testing, code reviews, security efforts, documentation, and maintainability measures.
• Mentor engineers by providing technical guidance, code reviews, and documentation to elevate team quality.

Required Qualifications

• At least five years of professional software engineering experience with a proven record of launching production software at scale.
• Expertise in parser generators, interpreters, language runtimes, compilers, or experience managing language features throughout their lifecycle.
• Proven ability to independently lead complex technical projects, make architectural choices, communicate trade-offs, and deliver results with minimal supervision.
• Experience designing and maintaining reliable, high-performance software components consumed by multiple teams or large user bases.
• Strong grasp of software engineering best practices including automation testing, code reviews, security consciousness, and architectural foresight.
• Ability to coordinate across organizational and team borders, identify technical dependencies, resolve impediments, and drive projects to completion.
• Experience mentoring and improving team technical quality through reviews, design discussions, documentation, or direct mentorship.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to work effectively in both real-time and asynchronous settings.
• Self-driven, comfortable managing ambiguity while maintaining ownership and momentum.
• Familiarity with HTML5 standards and Document Object Model manipulation is advantageous.
• Experience with Node.js and associated technologies is a plus.
• Knowledge of wikitext, Markdown editors, content management systems like MediaWiki, Drupal, or WordPress is desirable.
• Open-source contributions history is highly regarded.
• Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate degree in computer science, software engineering, STEM, or equivalent certification preferred but not mandatory.
• Passion for knowledge equity, free culture, open access, and enabling broad participation through technology is highly valued.

Benefits and Work Environment

• Opportunity to work remotely within a globally distributed engineering team.
• Engagement with open-source software serving hundreds of millions of users and massive multilingual content.
• Meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access initiatives.
• Occasional travel for team or organizational events.
• Competitive and fair compensation adjusted based on location, experience, and skills.
• Support for professional growth and deepening expertise in large-scale software development.
• A collaborative culture that emphasizes consensus, communication, and inclusivity.
• Strong commitment to work-life balance and sustainable working practices.
• An inclusive workplace that embraces diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences.
• Applicable employment benefits in country of hire including statutory provisions.

Additional Information

This position is facilitated through a platform that applies AI-assisted candidate matching to ensure objective review and shortlisting. The hiring company manages all interview and selection proceedings. The processing of personal data complies with applicable data protection laws, and AI tools are used for recruitment support without replacing human judgment.