Software Engineer (Trust & Safety Team)

You will be working on, and improving, a codebase that has evolved over two decades. Much of our framework code was developed in-house, so you'll need to be comfortable learning through research, reviewing patches, and reading documentation. PHP and JavaScript make up most of our code. 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 consider communication, enthusiasm, and eagerness to learn as important as certificates or degrees.

Responsibilities

• Developing, testing, and deploying new features, improvements and upgrades to various systems and tools used by administrators and staff.
• Writing multilingual, accessible, and performant user interfaces using PHP, JavaScript, VueJS, and CSS.
• Documenting your contributions to our codebase in our technical documentation and our features’ documentation.
• Contributing to projects that require handling sensitive data and private information, complying with privacy and security regulations.
• Providing support in abuse investigations on our platform, helping identify sources and causes of incidents, and proposing ideas to mitigate their impact.
• Developing expertise in the Trust and Safety area, which includes, security, privacy, abuse mitigation, content moderation and legal compliance.
• Extending the capabilities of the MediaWiki stack to serve diverse community needs by incorporating possibilities that are offered by new tooling or technical advances.
• Working across teams to proactively reduce technical debt by refactoring code, updating testing frameworks, and reviewing code from other engineers.

Skills and experience

• 3+ years of related professional or volunteering experience in software engineering roles, including frontend and backend development, with an emphasis on backend.
• 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.
• Experience converting design mockups into functional components, incorporating performance and accessibility into the features using well-documented and readable code.
• Focused software engineering: writing unit and integration tests, proactively addressing security and code review feedback, and thoughtfully balancing tradeoffs.
• Strong written communication skills as our collaboration largely happens online, on chats, wikis, documents and tickets.

Qualities that are important to us

• The desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access.
• An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• The willingness to participate in technical discussions, proposing solutions to technical challenges, participating in code reviews and receiving feedback.
• An eagerness and curiosity to solve technical problems, trying things out and investigating issues, and supporting the work of others.
• The skill to effectively work with documentation, writing clearly and concisely, and navigating existing documentation in search for answers.
• A sensitivity for the problems we are solving, empathy for our users, and the tact to handle the content and information we process.

Additionally, we’d love it if you have this

• 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.
• Experience with online community moderation, vandalism prevention and other Trust and Safety concepts and practices