An executive leadership opportunity is available for a deeply technical and outcome-oriented Director of Data at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia. This director will lead all work across data engineering, search, experimentation, and data-related Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

This is a full-time, remote-first position. Candidates must be located within the UTC-8 to UTC+3 geographical range due to the location of the existing team. The anticipated annual salary range for applicants based in the United States is $179,376 to $279,262 (adjusted for non-US locations).

Role Summary and Petabyte-Scale Platform Leadership

The Director is accountable for shipping reliable, privacy-respecting data products and platforms that power product analytics, machine learning, product features, and public datasets for Wikipedia, a top-ten global website. This role manages managers and Principal ICs across multiple, mission-critical teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Team & People Leadership: Manage managers, coach senior ICs, and scale hiring for a diverse, international, remote-first organization. Foster a collaborative, mission-aligned culture.
• Technical Strategy & Oversight: Provide strategic technical oversight for the platform, setting architectural direction grounded in experience with event-based architectures, data ingestion, modeling, data governance, privacy by design principles, and cost efficiency.
• Roadmap & Execution: Set clear, realistic roadmaps and drive the work across Data Engineering, Search, Experimentation, and Data SRE in close partnership with Product Management. Balance velocity with reliability and involve stakeholders from both the Foundation and the larger volunteer community.
• Operational Excellence: You are an operational multiplier, identifying and sharing patterns that reduce toil. You set and hold SLOs/error budgets, manage vendor relationships, and treat incidents as opportunities to automate and harden systems.
• Collaboration: Partner effectively with the Group Product Manager for Data Platform and senior PMs to balance technical implementation with diverse user needs and navigate priority trade-offs.

Required Experience and Technical Qualifications

The ideal candidate is deeply technical with strong judgment, a history of managing managers, and hands-on experience scaling production data systems at the massive scale required by a top-ten global website.

• Leadership Experience: 8+ years of engineering leadership with 3+ years managing managers across data-heavy backend teams, or an equivalent track record.
• Scale & Scope: Track record of shipping production data systems at massive (internet) scale. Knowledge of what “good” looks like for petabyte-scale data lakes, event pipelines, and search/experimentation stacks.
• Technical Proficiency: Hands-on experience with relevant open-source tech stacks (e.g., Kubernetes, Kafka, Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Ceph, Airflow).
• Execution Style: Biased towards shipping regularly and with confidence; capable of breaking work into safe, incremental releases and unblocking teams quickly.
• Culture: Mission-driven, balancing product impact with privacy and transparency, and partnering with volunteers to build in the open.
• Global Team: Ability to hire, coach, and lead globally distributed teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• A track record of open-source participation.
• Fluency or familiarity with languages in addition to English.
• Experience as a member of a volunteer community.