The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineering contractor to join our Future Audiences effort, reporting to product engineering management. Future Audiences is the Wikimedia Foundation’s effort to investigate opportunities for spreading and sustaining free knowledge in a rapidly changing Internet (e.g., AI assistants, social video apps, and more). A recent experiment is the Wikipedia plugin for ChatGPT, which allows ChatGPT users to access the latest content from the encyclopedia in the ChatGPT interface, complete with attribution and opportunities to engage with Wikipedia. Another is our Citation Needed browser plugin, which uses generative AI to verify information as they browse the web. As a Future Audiences engineer, you will be responsible for collaborating with product managers, data analysts, and machine learning engineers to deploy these types of software experiments across a variety of platforms.

In this role, you will work in a remote environment, where we value teamwork and a consensus-oriented approach. You get to experiment to learn how new technologies and platforms can help empower and sustain the ability of every human in the world to share high-quality free knowledge, and you get to do it at a place that believes we’re all more successful when everyone has a good work-life balance.

You are responsible for:

• Being a thought-partner on a small cross-functional team that acts as a startup within a larger organization – not just executing, but also co-planning and brainstorming new ideas and approaches to knowledge-sharing and contribution
• Developing experimental solutions across a range of platforms, taking into account existing insights, technical constraints, organizational needs, and specific platform demands. This work might include anything from AI assistants to social video apps to browser plugins.
• Working very independently with little support from other engineers.
• Working with third-party and Wikimedia APIs to develop off-platform API integrations
• Keeping your finger on the pulse of new technologies and platforms as they arise and identifying timely opportunities to experiment/learn more about their capabilities
• Instrumenting components that allow the team to routinely monitor feature and quality characteristics and enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts
• Making recommendations for ways to improve our experimental R&D infrastructure to enable more efficient development and learning
• Working with design and engineering to develop interfaces

Skills and experience:

• 5-8+ years related professional experience in functional programming or OOP
• Experience working with cross-functional teams to build and test new product concepts
• Experience working in a self-driven, lean environment
• Ability to come up to speed quickly on a codebase, new and emergent technology or platform
• Experience working with a range of third party API services – familiarity with Wikipedia APIs is a plus
• Fullstack development experience:
  • Frontend: practical experience with Javascript frameworks such as Vue.js or React
  • Backend: Python familiarity or other backend development experience;

Qualities that are important to us:

• Ability to develop and deliver in a small team capacity
• A strong belief in Wikimedia’s principles of using technology ethically: that is, to empower humans to share knowledge freely, equitably, and transparently
• A willingness to iterate quickly and pivot strategically, embracing the changing nature of technology, user behavior, and learning opportunities that the future may bring
• An emphasis on communicating clearly in both synchronous and asynchronous channels

Additionally, we’d love it if you have this:

• Experience working with generative AI APIs
• Fluency in one or more regional languages in Africa, Asia, or Latin America
• Experience with data science, machine learning, and/or AI (e.g., familiarity with prompt engineering, Jupyter notebooks experience, etc.)
• Experience working with cloud environments
• A history of open source contributions
• Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate degree in computer science, management information systems, or STEM field (or equivalent certification)