Wikimedia Foundation · 16 hours ago
Staff Database Administrator
United States
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
6+ years expWikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects, aiming to support and protect the sum of all human knowledge. The Staff Database Administrator will be responsible for the health and performance of Wikimedia’s production relational database systems, ensuring their availability and performance for millions of users.
Computer Software
Responsibilities
Ensure the health and performance of Wikimedia’s production relational database systems, and the structural integrity of its data
Deploy, maintain and troubleshoot relational database systems in production, development and staging environments
Design, implement, manage and automate (multi-site) replication topologies
Consult in the design of database schemas and queries, and implement/oversee database schema changes in production
Monitor, debug and optimize database query performance
Improve observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
Capacity and infrastructure planning, including (on-prem) bare-metal hardware
Contribute to the automation of common database management workflows
Enable the reliable generation and timely restoration of database backups
Maintain relationships with the MariaDB upstream projects/organizations, and working with upstream developers on bug identification and resolution
Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation shared across the team - taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure
Qualification
Required
Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database, including complex replication topologies at scale
Advanced proficiency in SQL and query/schema optimization
Experience with debugging query performance and schema design
Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations
Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling
Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)
6+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team
Solid English language skills
Ability to travel 1-2 times a year
Ability to work independently in a fast paced environment, as an effective part of a globally distributed team, including ticket tracking systems and asynchronous communication tools
B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science, or equivalent work experience
Preferred
Proficiency at automation/programming/scripting (Python) and standard software development practices
Experience with SRE practices and tooling, including configuration management & orchestration strongly preferred
Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis) - MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
Experience with other advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.) is a plus
Strong track record of open source contributions is a major plus
Company
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation encourages the development and distribution of free educational content with projects such as Wikipedia.
501-1000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Wikimedia Foundation has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (4)
2023 (5)
2022 (3)
2021 (1)
2020 (5)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$158.98MKey Investors
Alfred P. Sloan FoundationCraig Newmark PhilanthropiesGoogle.org
2020-01-01Grant· $2.1M
2019-09-10Grant· $2.5M
2019-01-22Grant· $1.1M
Leadership Team
Maryana Iskander
Chief Executive Officer
Denny Vrandečić
Head of Special Projects
Recent News
MarketScreener
2025-12-04
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