Database Administrator

Overview

We’re hiring a Staff Database Administrator to support and protect the sum of all human knowledge, shared by Wikipedia and its sister projects. Much of that knowledge is stored using Maria

DB, and therefore we’re looking for someone with strong expertise in designing, operating and optimizing relational (SQL) database infrastructure at large scale (Maria

DB and other MySQL derivatives in particular) to support and scale the technology behind Wikipedia and its sister projects—some of the most visited websites on the internet.

Our work powers the daily experiences of hundreds of millions of users. As a Staff DBA you will be responsible for the health of our database systems and the products and services that depend on them, including their availability and performance. You’ll join the SRE Data Persistence team, a small, high-impact group responsible for Wikimedia’s production storage and retrieval systems and infrastructure, within the Site Reliability Engineers in Product & Technology.

• 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-premises 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 Maria
  
  DB upstream projects/organizations and work with upstream developers on bug identification and resolution.
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation, incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure.

• Advanced level of experience with Maria
  
  DB or MySQL as the primary production database, including complex replication topologies at scale.
• Advanced proficiency in SQL and query/schema optimization; experience debugging query performance and schema design.
• Experience with high-traffic and highly available website architectures and operations; experience with MySQL high availability and replication tooling.
• Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (production Linux environment).
• 6+ years of hands-on DBA experience as part of a team.
• Ability to travel 1-2 times per year; ability to work independently in a fast-paced, globally distributed team with ticket tracking systems and asynchronous communication tools.
• B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science, or equivalent work experience.

• Automation/programming/scripting skills (Python) and standard software development practices.
• Experience with SRE practices and tooling, including configuration management and orchestration (strongly preferred).
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis);
  Media Wiki experience is a definite plus.
• Experience with other distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.) is a plus.
• Strong track record of open source contributions is a major plus.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the associated Wikimedia free knowledge projects. We host Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support volunteer communities and partners, and advocate for policies that enable free knowledge to thrive. We are remote-first, with staff and contractors in many countries.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We are a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

Equality and inclusion We are an equal opportunity employer and value a diverse workforce. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, age, disability, or other legally protected characteristics.