Senior Software Engineer, Android (Contract)

The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Android to support its App Experience and App Growth teams. The role focuses on delivering and improving Android Wikipedia app experiences, from technical discovery and system design through implementation, testing, observability, and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities:

• Delivery and enablement - Delivery of medium complexity initiatives from technical discovery through delivery. Breaks down initiatives into features, drive estimation and manage scope. Identifies risks early, and helps the team make pragmatic tradeoffs across quality, velocity, maintainability, and user impact
• Implementation - Improving the mobile Wikipedia product experiences that serve a global, multilingual audience on Android. Leads system design for medium-sized projects and can design and build accessible, adaptable, scalable components
• Quality, testing and observability - Consistently builds software that is easy to test, observe and debug. Instruments features that enable deeper analysis by Product Analysts
• Cross-functional collaboration - Partners with product managers, designers, analysts, and native app engineers to shape pragmatic solutions that balance user needs, technical constraints, platform expectations, and delivery timelines
• Prioritisation - Proactively identifies high-impact technical opportunities and risks across the engagement timeframe, works with the team to clarify priorities and sequencing. Actively keeps the team aligned on outcomes, capacity, and shared goals
• Culture and standards - Complies with team standards in code review, technical design, testing, documentation, accessibility, observability, and decision-making - fostering transparency, empathy, and collaboration
• Operational Awareness - Plans work with awareness of downstream or upstream effects

Requirements:

• Clear communicator - You can explain your ideas simply and adapt your communication to different audiences across engineering, product, and non-technical audiences in both synchronous and asynchronous channels
• Autonomy - Operates with high autonomy in a team setting and cross-team settings. You own your work end-to-end and practice a culture of responsibility and follow-through
• Feedback - You give and receive feedback with curiosity and empathy. Helps others resolve misunderstandings productively
• Builds strong relationships - Proactively brings the right people into discussions, identifies process improvements
• Comfortable with ambiguity - You are comfortable with ambiguity and can collaborate to solve complex problems with pragmatic solutions. Connects ideas and can regularly balance trade-offs across related domains to create well-rounded solutions
• Knowledge sharing - Strong knowledge-sharing practices, documents work for handover and consistently helps others understand and apply shared knowledge. You enjoy working with others to solve problems and are open to feedback. You inspire trust and progress through support, example, and thoughtful contributions
• Outcome-oriented - You prioritise work that delivers value to users and aligns with organizational goals.You balance ideal solutions with the constraints of legacy, user expectations and delivery needs
• Bachelor‘s and 5-10+ years related professional experience with significant experience building Android applications
• Strong professional experience and proficiency with Kotlin, XML, Jetpack Compose, and familiarity with architectural patterns in Android
• Experience of Android performance optimisation techniques to ensure smooth, responsive, and high-performing applications under a variety of conditions
• Experience working in a self-driven, lean environment
• Commitment to the Foundation‘s Mission and Values
• Experience adding webview-wrapped experiences to existing native mobile apps (iOS or Android)
• Experience in maintaining cross-platform mobile applications
• Experience building mobile games or other interactive mobile experiences
• Experience with data science, machine learning, and/or AI (e.g., familiarity with prompt engineering, Jupyter notebooks experience, etc.)
• Familiarity with Wikipedia / wikitext / markdown editing or content management systems (e.g., MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress)
• Experience with leveraging agentic coding to scale the work of small engineering teams
• Bachelor‘s, master‘s, or doctorate degree in computer science, management information systems, or STEM field (or equivalent certification)
• Prior experience with MediaWiki or Wikimedia projects
• A history of open source contributions