What You’ll Do
Team & Delivery Leadership
- Addresses issues of diverse scope where analysis of situation or data requires evaluation of a variety of factors, including an understanding of Foundation priorities & current business trends
- Lead timely, high-quality engineering delivery for WDQS and related query platform services, including large-scale platform or data migrations involving multiple teams and stakeholders
- Ensure reliability, performance, and sustainability of existing and future query infrastructure
- Oversee planning activities including estimation, resource allocation, and work break-down, and balance roadmap work with maintenance needs
- Triage incoming issues, bugs, and operational incidents
Technical & Platform Strategy
- Develop and drive long-term engineering strategy for WDQS, including lifecycle management, architectural tradeoffs, and future planning
- Partner with SRE and other Foundation teams to ensure operational excellence and alignment across the data ecosystem
- Safeguard privacy, security, and data integrity across query services
- Provide technical input on system design, complexity, estimates, and feasibility
People Management
- Hire, onboard, mentor, and support the professional growth and performance of engineers on the Wikidata Platform team
- Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe culture
- Ensure healthy team processes and rituals, time management, and sustainable on-call practices
Cross-Functional & Affiliate Collaboration
- Partner closely with the Product and Tech Leads to define roadmaps, priorities, work scopes, and deliver impactful outcomes
- Proactive dependency management—staying on top of the teams we depend on and the teams that depend on us
- Maintain strong, productive collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) product and engineering counterparts
- Communicate technical plans, risks, and progress clearly to internal teams, leadership, and external stakeholders
Skills and Experience We’re Looking For
- 5+ years of engineering management experience leading teams building API-driven or platform-level data services
- Experience collaborating closely with product and tech leads on software development teams that ship products with community input
- Experience building and operating large-scale, high-throughput products, with strong foundations in observability, incident response, runbook quality, and overall operational excellence
- Experience guiding software systems through their full lifecycle
- Strong people management skills including hiring, coaching, and performance management
- Experience working with data streams and data-intensive applications
- Experience navigating challenges related to privacy-sensitive data
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