Summary
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
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
More information
WMF Blog Wikimedia 2030 Wikimedia Medium Term Plan Diversity and inclusion information for Wikimedia workers, by the numbers Wikimania 2019 Annual Report – 2017 This is Wikimedia Foundation Facts Matter Our Projects Fundraising Report
