Staff Database Administrator

We're hiring a Staff Database Administrator to support and protect the sum of all human knowledge, shared by Wikipedia and its sister projects. Much of that knowledge is stored using MariaDB, and therefore we're looking for someone with a strong expertise in designing, operating and optimizing relational (SQL) database infrastructure at large scale (MariaDB and other MySQL derivatives in particular), to support and scale the technology behind Wikipedia and its sister projects, some of the most visited websites on the internet. Our work powers the daily experiences of hundreds of millions of users. You'll have the opportunity to learn, take on new challenges, and make a tangible difference on a global scale.

As a Staff DBA you will be responsible for the health of our database systems and the products and services that depend on them – including their availability and performance. You'll join the SRE Data Persistence team, a small, high-impact team responsible for Wikimedia's production storage & retrieval systems and infrastructure, part of a larger sub-department of Site Reliability Engineers in Product & Technology.

You Are Responsible For

• Ensure the health and performance of Wikimedia's production relational database systems, and the structural integrity of its data.
• Deploy, maintain and troubleshoot relational database systems in production, development and staging environments.
• Design, implement, manage and automate (multi-site) replication topologies.
• Consult in the design of database schemas and queries, and implement/oversee database schema changes in production.
• Monitor, debug and optimize database query performance.
• Improve observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure.
• Capacity and infrastructure planning, including (on-prem) bare-metal hardware.
• Contribute to the automation of common database management workflows.
• Enable the reliable generation and timely restoration of database backups.
• Maintain relationships with the MariaDB upstream projects/organizations, and working with upstream developers on bug identification and resolution.
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation shared across the team - taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia's production infrastructure.

You share our values and guiding principles, and work in accordance with them.

Skills And Experience

• Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database, including complex replication topologies at scale.
• Advanced proficiency in SQL and query/schema optimization.
• Experience with debugging query performance and schema design.
• Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations.
• Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling.
• Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively).
• 6+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team.
• Solid English language skills.
• Ability to travel 1-2 times a year.
• 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.

Additionally, We'd Love It If You Have

• Proficiency at automation/programming/scripting (Python) and standard software development practices.
• Experience with SRE practices and tooling, including configuration management & orchestration strongly preferred.
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis) - MediaWiki experience is a definite plus.
• Experience with other advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.) is a plus.
• 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.