Interim Engineering Manager Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects (all genders)

Free knowledge leads to a fairer world. Wikipedia is the most important online knowledge collection of our time. The German Wikipedia alone records almost 1 billion page views per month for a total of 3 million articles. We – Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. – support the volunteers of Wikipedia and its sister projects, develop free software, such as Wikidata, and advocate for free access to knowledge, the opening of education and research, and more common good orientation in data policy.

Interim Engineering Manager Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects (all genders)

Full‑time, 12‑month fixed‑term contract starting or sooner. Hybrid working model with weekly presence in our Berlin office.

About the position & the team

In this role, you will be responsible for the Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects engineering development and team leadership. Wikidata is a free, collaboratively created knowledge graph. Since 2012, the project has grown within Wikimedia Deutschland and celebrated its 10th birthday in 2022. Wikidata stores important Wikimedia data for Wikipedia in a central location and helps distribute maintenance workload across language and project boundaries.

The overarching goal of the Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects team is to strengthen the mutually beneficial relationship between Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects, ensuring long‑term sustainability.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead and manage a team of engineers working to improve Wikidata for Wikimedia Project features and products.
• Represent the team within the organization, towards the Wikimedia Foundation, and publicly.
• Mentor and lead the engineering team to build features that enable our communities to achieve their visions, making our services stable and efficient for the future.
• Collaborate with engineers and managers from cross‑functional teams to develop team goals, track progress, and build features, products, and services used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
• Help team members foster a culture of learning and personal growth, maintaining high quality work.
• Create a safe environment by understanding the team’s psychological needs.
• Identify and prioritize technical debt, driving efforts to address it and align development with overall organizational goals.
• Support your team through performance reviews, budgeting, and career development.
• Sense‑make the organization’s strategy for the team, ensuring alignment with overarching goals and providing the right guidance.

What makes you right for this role

• Prior, proven experience in a leadership role (team lead or engineering manager) of ~5 engineers and experience managing cross‑functional departments, diverse backgrounds, and complex products.
• Excellent communicator who thrives in an environment driven by collaboration, participation, and a strong community.
• Experience with large‑scale web applications, databases, and distributed systems, including MySQL, MariaDB, PHP, Docker.
• Ability to guide the team on optimizing data access, table structures, or database sharding.
• Professional level proficiency in English; good knowledge of German or willingness to learn.
• Preferably experience with open‑source software development and basic knowledge of the Wikimedia projects and communities.
• Additional experience with Wikidata (or Wikibase), Blazegraph, or SPARQL is a plus.

Equal Opportunity

Wikimedia Germany is committed to equal opportunities and does not discriminate on the basis of, for example, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or belief, political or other convictions, gender, age, disability, or sexual identity. We would like to address you in the way which feels most comfortable for you, so please share your preferred name and pronouns if you wish.