Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. is a non-profit organisation based in Berlin, Germany. With over 150 employees and about 100,000 members, it is the oldest and largest of about 40 independent chapters of the international Wikimedia movement. The best known Wikimedia project, the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, is used by millions of people across the world every day and is continuously updated and improved by millions of users.

Wikimedia Deutschland promotes these ideals even beyond the free encyclopaedia; it is our aim to establish and advocate for the creation, collection, and distribution of free knowledge in all parts of society. The Wikimedia vision is to create a world in which the sum of all human knowledge is freely accessible for everyone. The main focus of our activities is the support of volunteers, the development of technology and software, and the cooperation with cultural and scientific institutions. Furthermore, we advocate on both the national and EU-level a legal framework which allows for free knowledge to become part of our everyday life.

We are looking for a Junior Software Engineer Wikibase Product Platform(m/f/d) (Full time / Part time (min. 30 hpw)) to join and support one of our agile development teams.

About the position:

You will be working with the team that develops and improves the software platform that serves as a base to the Wikidata project and the Wikibase Ecosystem of interconnected knowledge bases. You will be developing open source software that puts user needs first and increases our users’ satisfaction. At Wikimedia Deutschland we work towards a future in which people share the power to collect and organize the data that shapes humanity’s understanding of the world.

Among your tasks there will be the following:

• Work in an agile work environment
• Participate in all the stages of software development
• Write readable, testable, and efficient code
• Review code written by other engineers
• Understand the impact of engineering decisions on our products

What we offer:

• You will have a noticeable impact on one of the top visited websites in the world and will be part of a cohesive and engaged team that fosters unity and supports each other
• Flexible working hours adjusted to the team and people needs
• You will be creating open source software on a daily basis – almost all software created by Wikimedia Deutschland is published under open source licences
• A teammate of yours will be assigned to be your buddy, who will closely support you in the beginning as you learn your way around our technologies and processes
• A yearly learning budget that you choose how to spend to support you in your personal and professional development
• A diverse and inclusive bi-lingual organisation where people are the first priority
• A working culture that supports releasing a good product over releasing in order to meet a deadline
• We dedicate one day per quarter in the department to work on any non-work-related project you want
• Opportunity to go to conferences, both as participants and contributors
• The possibility of working from home when needed as well as a modern and centrally located office space – at the heart of Berlin – with a fully equipped kitchen, different sized meeting rooms and working spaces
• A permanent contract
• And a lot more: 30 days of holidays, public transport allowance, access to complementary pension benefits, continued salary in the event of ill children, free-of-cost external life coaching

Learn more about our team by visiting our Wikimedia Tech News Blog.

About you:

• You are passionate and care about software
• Have some relevant – not necessarily professional – experience in web development
• You want to keep learning and developing yourself
• You like being in a team working towards a common goal, learning together, and supporting your peers
• You like to participate in technical discussions and are open to new ideas
• You are not afraid of making mistakes and you learn from them
• You are able to communicate fluently in English

Technologies we use:

Knowledge and experience in these technologies is not a requirement. We believe they all can be learned on the job and WMDE, your team, and your line manager will support you in this learning. We list only a few of them here.

Most of our server side code is written in PHP and for version control we use Git. We use Vue.js and TypeScript for our modern frontends. We also keep migrating our legacy code into these and newer technologies. Testing is also important to us; we use testing frameworks and practice continuous integration across our projects.

Interested?

Then apply now! Send us your detailed application documents via our job portal. Our personnel team will be happy to answer your questions. We kindly ask you to refrain from application photos and information on date of birth, marital status and parents. We look forward to hearing from you!

Wikimedia Germany is committed to equal opportunities and does not discriminate on the basis of, for example, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or belief, political or other convictions, gender, age, disability or sexual identity or orientation.

In light of an underrepresentation of women in our engineering teams, we very much welcome a broad diversity of candidates.

Due to the current COVID – 19 situation, job interviews will only take place digitally.