Engineering Manager Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects Full-time

At Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. we help create, collect and distribute free knowledge.

In 2004, volunteer Wikipedia activists founded the non-profit association Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin, which now consists of over 100,000 members and 160 full-time staff.

Free knowledge leads to a fairer world. Wikipedia is the most important online knowledge collection of our time. The German Wikipedia alone records almost 1 billion page views per month for a total of 2.6 million articles. We – Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. – support the volunteers of Wikipedia and its sister projects, develop free software, such as Wikidata, and advocate for free access to knowledge, the opening of education and research, and more common good orientation in data policy.

For our team Engineering Management, based in Berlin, we are looking for a permanent Engineering Manager Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects (m/f/d), full-time or part-time, as soon as possible.

About the position & the team:

In this role, you will be responsible for the Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects engineering development and team leadership. Wikidata is a free, collaboratively created knowledge graph. In 2012, we started the project at Wikimedia Deutschland; in 2022 we celebrated its 10th birthday. Amongst others, Wikidata stores important specified Wikimedia data for Wikipedia in a central location and helps to distribute the maintenance workload across language and project boundaries.

From its beginning, Wikidata was intended to support other Wikimedia projects and, today, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects are inextricably linked. It is the overarching goal of the Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects team that we strengthen this mutually beneficial relationship and ensure its long-term sustainability. You will be a founding member of this team.

More information about Wikidata can be found here

What you’ll be doing:

• You are responsible for leading and managing the team of engineers working to improve the Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects features and products and will be representing the team within the organization and publicly
• You support the development of our Wikidata & Wikimedia Projects development strategy by hiring, mentoring, and leading the engineering team to help build features that enable our communities to achieve their visions
• You collaborate with engineers and managers from various departments, to develop team goals and track progress to build features, products, and services used by hundreds of millions of people around the world
• You will be helping team members to foster a culture of learning and personal growth and ensure that the team’s work maintains high quality
• You work with the team to identify and prioritize technical debt and drive efforts to address it and support them to deliver on time and align development with the overall goals of the organization
• You support your team by completing performance reviews, compensation planning, and career development

What we offer:

• A participative collaboration guided by our values: participation, diversity, free and open access, equity, sustainability and respectful collaboration
• Benefits: 30 vacation days and additional time off on Dec. 24th and New Year’s Eve, public transport ticket, access to our company pension scheme allowance, continued salary in the event of sick children
• All overtime is recorded and converted into compensatory time off
• An office located in the center of Berlin and hybrid work options
• In-house training and continued professional development as well as free external life coaching (professional advice and coaching on job-related and private issues)

What makes you right for this role:

• You have experience as an inclusive leader (team lead, senior developer, or manager) with a diverse software development team in an agile and hybrid environment and are an excellent communicator and collaborator
• You have previously been working with large-scale web applications and distributed systems
• You have strong technical skills with web development (PHP, JavaScript)
  Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or other relevant technical fields
• You have experience with open source software development and you possess basic knowledge of the Wikimedia projects and communities
• Your written and verbal communication skills in English are proficient, and you have a good knowledge of the German language or the willingness to learn it

Interested?

Then apply now! Send us your detailed application documents (Resume & Motivational Letter (yes, we read them)) via our job portal. We kindly ask you to refrain from application photos and information on date of birth, marital status and parents.

Our HR team will be happy to answer your questions. Please contact us via jobs@wikimedia.de

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.