Senior Software Engineer, iOS (3-Month Contract) - Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, iOS to join the App Growth team within the Core Experiences engineering group on a 3-month full-time contract.

The App Growth team aims to make Wikimedia apps the primary destination for knowledge seekers and grow active readership. The team oversees the cross-platform feature framework, determining where features best reside to maximize user engagement and value.

Key Responsibilities:

• Delivery and Enablement – Lead medium-complexity initiatives from technical discovery to delivery. Break down initiatives into features, drive estimation, and manage scope. Identify risks early and facilitate pragmatic trade-offs between quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact.
• Implementation – Enhance the mobile Wikipedia product experiences for a global, multilingual audience on iOS. Lead system design for medium-sized projects and develop accessible, adaptable, and scalable components.
• Quality, Testing, and Observability – Build software that is easy to test, observe, and debug. Instrument features to enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts.
• Cross-functional Collaboration – Partner with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to create solutions balancing user needs, technical constraints, platform expectations, and timelines.
• Prioritization – Proactively identify high-impact technical opportunities and risks. Work with the team to clarify priorities and sequencing, ensuring alignment on outcomes, capacity, and shared goals.
• Culture and Standards – Adhere to team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making, fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration.
• Operational Awareness – Plan work with awareness of downstream or upstream effects.

Key Qualities:

• Clear Communicator – Explain ideas simply and adapt communication for diverse audiences (engineering, product, non-technical) in both synchronous and asynchronous channels.
• Autonomy – Operate with high autonomy in team and cross-team settings, owning work end-to-end and practicing responsibility.
• Feedback – Give and receive feedback with curiosity and empathy, resolving misunderstandings productively.
• Relationship Building – Proactively engage the right people in discussions and identify process improvements.
• Comfortable with Ambiguity – Collaborate to solve complex problems with pragmatic solutions, balancing trade-offs across domains.
• Knowledge Sharing – Strong documentation practices, consistent knowledge transfer, and open collaboration.
• Outcome-Oriented – Prioritize work delivering value to users and aligning with organizational goals, balancing ideal solutions with constraints.

Requirements:

• A Bachelor’s degree and 5-10+ years of professional experience building iOS applications.
• Proficiency in Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, and familiarity with iOS architectural patterns.
• Experience in iOS performance optimization for smooth, responsive, and high-performing applications.
• Experience in a self-driven, lean environment.
• Commitment to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Mission and Values.

Nice-to-Have:

• Experience with webview-wrapped experiences in native mobile apps.
• Experience maintaining cross-platform mobile applications.
• Experience building mobile games or interactive mobile experiences.
• Experience with data science, machine learning, or AI (e.g., prompt engineering, Jupyter notebooks).
• Familiarity with Wikipedia/wikitext/Markdown or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress).
• Experience with agentic coding to scale engineering team work.
• A degree in computer science, management information systems, or STEM (or equivalent certification).
• Prior experience with MediaWiki or Wikimedia projects.
• A history of open-source contributions.