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.

For our Software Engineering Team, based in Berlin, we are looking for an Interim Engineering Manager Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects (all genders), full-time, ideally starting 01.09.2026 or sooner for 12-month fixed-term contract.

This position is designed as a 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. In 2012, we started the project at Wikimedia Deutschland; in 2022 we celebrated its 10th birthday. Amongst others, Wikidata stores important specified Wikimedia data for Wikipedia in a central location and helps to distribute the maintenance workload across language and project boundaries.

From its beginning, Wikidata was intended to support other Wikimedia projects and, today, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects are inextricably linked. It is the overarching goal of the Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects team that we strengthen this mutually beneficial relationship and ensure its long-term sustainability. 

What you’ll be doing:

• You are responsible for leading and managing a team of engineers working to improve the Wikidata for Wikimedia Project’s features and products
• You represent the team within the organization, towards the Wikimedia Foundation and publicly.
• You support the development of our Wikidata & Wikimedia Projects strategy by mentoring and leading the engineering team to help build features that enable our communities to achieve their visions and make our services stable and efficient for the future.
• You collaborate with engineers and managers from cross-functional teams, to develop team goals and track progress to build features, products, and services used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
• You will help team members to foster a culture of learning and personal growth and ensure that the team's work maintains high quality.
• You are not only a tech leader, you also understand your team’s psychological needs and create a safe environment for them.
• You work with the team to identify and prioritize technical debt and drive efforts to address it and support them to deliver on time and align development with the overall goals of the organization.
• You support your team by completing performance reviews, budgeting, and career development.
• You are sensemaking the organisation’s strategy to the team to ensure alignment with the overarching goals and providing the right guidance.

What makes you right for this role:

• You have prior, proven experience in a leadership role (team lead or engineering manager) of ~5 engineers and in a setting of cross-functional departments, diverse backgrounds and complex products.
• You  are an excellent communicator and you work best in an environment driven by collaboration, participation and a strong community.
• You have previously been working with large-scale web applications, databases  and distributed systems as well as with technologies like MySql, MariaDB, PHP, Docker.
• You can give the team guidance on how to optimize data access, table structures or even sharding of databases.
• You can communicate in English on a professional level, and you have good knowledge of the German language or the willingness to learn it.
• Ideally, you have worked with open-source software development and you possess basic knowledge of the Wikimedia projects and communities.
• If you have used Wikidata (or Wikibase) yourself, if you know Blazegraph or SPARQL, that is considered a plus.

Interested?

Please send us your detailed application documents (Resume & Motivational Letter via our job portal. We kindly ask you to refrain from application photos and information on date of birth, marital status and parents.

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.