Overview

Wikimedia’s goal is to provide every single person with the sum of all human knowledge and MariaDB/MySQL is how we store most of it. You will be joining a small mission driven team of talented highly experienced engineers.  As one of the most highly trafficked sites, there is literally nowhere else serving as many page views per engineer. As a Database Administrator at the Wikimedia Foundation, you will be responsible for the wellbeing of our relational data and the database systems they reside on, including the availability and performance.  You should be able to troubleshoot, benchmark and test new builds of MariaDB and MySQL, plan for disaster recovery, and improve and maintain backups. This is a unique opportunity to have a huge impact. Our work is important, and it’s used by hundreds of millions of people.

Responsibilities

  • Implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting of relational database systems in production and staging environments
  • Database performance tuning, high availability, replication, backups, and general optimization
  • Support the development and deployment of new services and systems
  • Handling configuration management, (Debian) package maintenance, patching and building, working with upstream on bug identification and resolution
  • Improving observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
  • Multi-datacenter design, capacity and infrastructure planning
  • Take part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
  • Share our values and work in accordance with them

Qualifications

  • Solid knowledge of relational database concepts and working experience with storage systems and architectures
  • Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration and replication topologies at scale
  • Proficiency in SQL
  • Decent programming language/scripting skills and experience managing software using relational databases at large scale
  • 3+ years experience in an DBA/SRE/Operations/DevOps role as part of a team
  • Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations
  • Advanced knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting
  • Experience with Open Source configuration management and orchestration tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, etc.), as well as modern observability infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, Graphite, Logstash/Kibana, Icinga/Nagios, etc.)
  • Experience with managing remotely both bare-metal servers and virtualized environments
  • Strong English language skills
  • Ability to work independently in a fast paced environment, as an effective part of a globally distributed team, including ticket tracking systems and asynchronous communication tools
  • B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Optional qualifications

  • Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis, MySQL) – MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
  • Experience with advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.) or graph databases (Titan, Blazegraph, etc.) is a big plus
  • Experience in architecture, design, and implementation of persistent data storage & query infrastructure
  • Strong track record of open source contributions is a major plus

The Wikimedia Foundation is… 

…the nonprofit organization that hosts and 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, free of interference. We host 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 financial support 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.

The Wikimedia Foundation is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply

U.S. Benefits & Perks*

  • Fully paid medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and their eligible families (yes, fully paid premiums!)
  • The Wellness Program provides reimbursement for mind, body and soul activities such as fitness memberships, baby sitting, continuing education and much more
  • The 401(k) retirement plan offers matched contributions at 4% of annual salary
  • Flexible and generous time off – vacation, sick and volunteer days, plus 19 paid holidays – including the last week of the year.
  • Family friendly! 100% paid new parent leave for seven weeks plus an additional five weeks for pregnancy, flexible options to phase back in after leave, fully equipped lactation room.
  • For those emergency moments – long and short term disability, life insurance (2x salary) and an employee assistance program
  • Pre-tax savings plans for health care, child care, elder care, public transportation and parking expenses
  • Telecommuting and flexible work schedules available
  • Appropriate fuel for thinking and coding (aka, a pantry full of treats) and monthly massages to help staff relax
  • Great colleagues – diverse staff and contractors speaking dozens of languages from around the world, fantastic intellectual discourse, mission-driven and intensely passionate people

*Eligible international workers’ benefits are specific to their location and dependent on their employer of record