Senior Database Administrator

Senior Database Administrator

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior DBA. Our objective is to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone, and we persist most of this knowledge in MariaDB. Our project sites are some of the most highly visited on the internet, with more page views per engineer than any other site.

As a Senior DBA at the Wikimedia Foundation, you will be part of a small, focused team of skilled and experienced engineers. In this role, you will be responsible for ensuring the health of our database systems - including their availability and performance. 

Your responsibilities will include troubleshooting issues, database maintenance, performance tuning, high availability, replication, backups, and general optimization as well as benchmarking and testing new MariaDB and MySQL builds.

WMF is a proponent of privacy and using free and open-source software. We run a large database cluster with MariaDB on bare metal Linux hosts.

The work we do is crucial and is used by hundreds of millions of people. This is a unique opportunity to make a huge impact for a good cause.

The candidate should be open to travel 1-2 times a year.

Responsibilities

• Implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting of relational database systems in production and staging environments
• Handling database version upgrades, testing and working with upstream on bug identification and resolution
• Configuring replication, designing schema optimizations and running schema changes
• Monitoring, debugging and improving query performance
• Improving observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
• Multi-datacenter replication topology design, capacity and infrastructure planning
• Taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure and participating in an on call rotation
• Sharing our values and work in accordance with them

Qualifications

• Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database as well as replication topologies at scale
• Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)
• Proficiency in SQL
• Experience with debugging query performance and schema design
• Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling
• Experience with remotely managing bare-metal servers
• 5+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team
• Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations
• 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.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Optional qualifications

• Proficient at automation/programming/scripting skills
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis) - MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
• Experience with advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, 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

About the Wikimedia Foundation

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$109,047 to US$169,455 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. 

*Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States of America and Uruguay.  Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR). 

We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements. 

All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or +1 (415) 839-6885.

More information

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