Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer 

PLEASE NOTE: We will only be considering hiring within UTC-3 to UTC+3 due to the geographical location of the team.

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an experienced and mission-driven Staff Software Engineer to join the Tools Platform team and provide senior technical leadership for Toolforge—the platform that powers over 3,300 community-built tools responsible for roughly 30% of all edits across Wikipedia and its sister projects.

This is a critical individual contributor role at the intersection of platform software, developer experience, and production infrastructure. You will lead the design and implementation of the software systems and workflows that tool developers depend on to build, deploy, operate, and sustain tools at scale.

Why this role matters

Community tool developers extend Wikimedia far beyond what staff teams alone can build. They automate moderation, support editors, process data, and enable entirely new workflows. Toolforge is their production platform.

Today, Toolforge has strong infrastructure foundations, and we're looking for Staff-level software engineering focused on developer workflows, lifecycle tooling, and product experience.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will shape how contributors interact with Toolforge end-to-end—reducing friction, improving reliability, and setting technical direction for a multi-year platform strategy.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Providing Staff-level technical leadership for the software and product experience layer of Toolforge.
• Designing and building the platform software and user-facing workflows used to create, deploy, debug, and maintain tools.
• Leading the redesign of Toolforge’s tool creation and maintenance UI
• Defining and implementing golden paths for common workloads such as Bots, Web tools and Data-processing tools
• Partnering closely with SREs to ensure platform software integrates cleanly with production infrastructure and operational practices.
• Acting as a technical multiplier for the team by mentoring engineers, raising engineering standards, and guiding architectural decisions.

What we’re looking for

• Extensive experience as a senior or Staff-level software engineer working on platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-adjacent systems.
• Strong architectural skills across APIs, backend services, and user-facing workflows.
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