Senior Software Engineer (Privacy) Job at Wikimedia Foundation (San Francisco)

Senior Software Engineer (Privacy)

Wikimedia Foundation

Location:
United States of America , San Francisco

Category:
IT - Software Development

Contract Type:
Not provided

Salary:

113082.00 - 175725.00 USD / Year

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Job Description:

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Product Safety and Integrity team and build new security features to protect Wikipedia and our other projects. This is a very hands-on engineering role, working alongside a team of engineers and product managers to design and implement new features to protect and reassure our users and to ensure the platform remains resilient against attacks.

Job Responsibility:

Helping design, develop, and deliver security features, with safety and security in mind
Working with other engineering teams to ensure that they make safe and compliant architectural and implementation choices
Leading by example in code review, decision-making, and team culture — fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration
Developing, reviewing, and deploying security features developed by the Foundation and community members
Conducting internal and external security and privacy reviews
Performing maintenance and addressing technical debt in security and privacy-critical components
Providing support for application security and privacy incidents and operations

Requirements:

5+ years of experience as a software engineer, ideally with focus on security or privacy
Ability to work effectively in a modern web application – ours is mostly PHP and JavaScript
Driving technical quality and operational excellence by defining and reinforcing standards in testing, observability, and system reliability
Comfortably and autonomously creating proofs of concept, writing design documents, and breaking down complex projects into actionable tasks to support less experienced team members
Experience in developing secure software or security and privacy-related product features
A strong interest in working with a talented security team and learning more specialist security skills such as exploiting and mitigating application-level vulnerabilities
Ability to explain complex security issues and their implications on privacy and risk to non-technical audiences
Sensitivity to the security and privacy challenges faced by participants in a large, international project
Experience working in a remote, distributed team

Nice to have:

Experience working on anti-abuse mechanisms, such as detecting bots or coordinated activity
Previous experience building security countermeasures against attacks on technologies at the web, backend, and database level
Experience finding and fixing security bugs and reviewing code for security gaps
A working knowledge of threat modeling, secure design patterns and privacy by design
Prior experience with MediaWiki or Wikimedia projects
Contributions to open-source software

Additional Information:

Job Posted:
January 31, 2026

Employment Type:

Fulltime

Work Type:

Remote work

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