Director of Site Reliability Engineering

Director of Site Reliability Engineering

We are strengthening the team and looking for a Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to lead our staff and ensure teams achieve our goals, towards our mission of providing the essential infrastructure for free knowledge. Wikimedia Foundation's SRE teams are responsible for ensuring our global top-10 web site Wikipedia, its sister projects and other public facing services are healthy, and for developing its infrastructure, platform and services further in the enablement of Wikimedia Foundation's mission. The SRE sub-department as a whole comprises over 50 creative and talented staff members who are globally distributed, organized into seven teams each with their own scope and focus area. The role reports to the VP of Site Reliability Engineering & Security.

• Your first priority: Lead multiple SRE teams in keeping Wikimedia's sites and services (including Wikipedia) running responsively, reliably and securely, including protection against and response to outages, data loss or breaches, and accommodation and implementation of Wikimedia's Movement Strategy.


• Your second priority: Partner with engineering teams at Wikimedia to set direction and build platforms enabling transformative changes to Wikimedia's user experience while ensuring appropriate operational review and support along the way.


• Your foundation: An amazing Site Reliability Engineering team that's taken us to serving billions of users a month with passion, ingenuity, solid engineering practices and duct tape. Nurturing, growing, trusting and developing this team and its leaders is key to success in this role.


• Your values: You care about free and open information, and are committed to finding solutions to engineering problems in line with our guiding principles. You share our values and work in accordance with them.

• 10+ years experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Technical Operations, or similar infrastructure engineering roles


• 5+ years experience managing infrastructure teams at high traffic websites or online services at scale


• Track record of managing, inspiring and mentoring multiple managers and engineers, and aligning them across the organization and in the community


• Experience with designing and leading engineering team practices and interfacing SRE with other design, product and engineering teams tasked with continuous delivery of functionality


• Good understanding of infrastructure technologies and architectures at high level, and an ability to lead and challenge engineers in setting technical direction


• Experience in managing large-scale projects involving high-level application platforms to low-level networking and compute infrastructure


• Experience developing and tracking department and project budgets


• Experience in globally distributed, high-traffic environments, preferably with both on-premise bare-metal and cloud based infrastructure


• Familiarity with open source development and community practices. Experience adopting/integrating open source solutions.


• Familiarity with large website application architectures including caching layers, storage scaling concepts, network infrastructure, monitoring systems, etc.


• Ability to travel 2-3 times a year


• Ability to work flexible hours with an organization spread across several time zones.

• A track record of modeling and shaping best community, open source and development practices


• Experience with highly geographically distributed (remote) teams and follow-the-sun operations is a major plus. Personal cross-cultural experience (having lived, or worked internationally) helps as well.


• Deep understanding of and hands-on technical expertise in relevant open-source software and infrastructure technologies


• Experience in negotiation & RFPs for infrastructure & data center service contracts, equipment purchases, peering agreements, SaaS services, etc.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that 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 freely. We host Wikipedia and 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 donations 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.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries*. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$172,976 to US$269,298 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location.