What You'll Do
Team & Delivery Leadership
Addresses issues of diverse scope where analysis of situation or data requires evaluation of a variety of factors, including an understanding of Foundation priorities & current business trends
Lead timely, high-quality engineering delivery for WDQS and related query platform services, including large-scale platform or data migrations involving multiple teams and stakeholders
Ensure reliability, performance, and sustainability of existing and future query infrastructure
Oversee planning activities including estimation, resource allocation, and work break-down, and balance roadmap work with maintenance needs
Triage incoming issues, bugs, and operational incidents
Technical & Platform Strategy
Develop and drive long-term engineering strategy for WDQS, including lifecycle management, architectural tradeoffs, and future planning
Partner with SRE and other Foundation teams to ensure operational excellence and alignment across the data ecosystem
Safeguard privacy, security, and data integrity across query services
Provide technical input on system design, complexity, estimates, and feasibility
People Management
Hire, onboard, mentor, and support the professional growth and performance of engineers on the Wikidata Platform team
Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe culture
Ensure healthy team processes and rituals, time management, and sustainable on-call practices
Cross-Functional & Affiliate Collaboration
Partner closely with the Product and Tech Leads to define roadmaps, priorities, work scopes, and deliver impactful outcomes
Proactive dependency management—staying on top of the teams we depend on and the teams that depend on us
Maintain strong, productive collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) product and engineering counterparts
Communicate technical plans, risks, and progress clearly to internal teams, leadership, and external stakeholders
Skills and Experience We're Looking For
5+ years of engineering management experience leading teams building API-driven or platform-level data services
Experience collaborating closely with product and tech leads on software development teams that ship products with community input
Experience building and operating large-scale, high-throughput products, with strong foundations in observability, incident response, runbook quality, and overall operational excellence
Experience guiding software systems through their full lifecycle
Strong people management skills including hiring, coaching, and performance management
Experience working with data streams and data-intensive applications
Experience navigating challenges related to privacy-sensitive data