The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization committed to building a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

Wikimedia's flagship project, Wikipedia, has become the largest general reference work ever compiled in human history.  Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have contributed more than 15 million encyclopedia articles in 265 languages, all of which can be freely shared and used for any purpose.  It is consulted by more than 370 million people every month, making it the fifth most popular web property world-wide.  The organization operates several other free knowledge projects, and is principally responsible for the development of the open source MediaWiki software powering its projects. 

The Wikimedia Projects as a group represent the highest traffic web properties running on Free and Open Source software and as such part of this role would be to continue to make choices that preserve this functional and important cultural characteristic.  The hardware architecture is heterogeneous, with hardware upgraded on a regular basis.  The site’s operations tools include a broad range of server, service and network monitoring tools, with many statistics published online in real time.  Documentation is maintained on an off-site wiki. 

The organization currently relies on data centers located in Tampa in Florida and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, with the intention of building out a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia and eventually shutting down the Tampa hosting, and possibly opening another data center in Asia.  The software architecture is a mix of Squid and Varnish, Apache, Memcached, MySQL, PHP, Perl and Python components running on load-balanced Ubuntu/Linux servers. 

The primary responsibility of the Director of Technical Operations is to provide for a stable, secure, documented, scalable and responsive systems environment.  Located in San Francisco, the Director of Technical Operations will report to the Chief Technical Officer and will work closely with other senior staff, volunteers and vendors (inc. data center and network providers, hardware and software vendors, site caching vendors, among others) that work for and with the technology group. 

While the objective of the Wikimedia Foundation is not to necessarily be on the bleeding edge of technology, the organization pursues a permanent agenda of technical innovation driven by its mission to make all knowledge available to every single human being.  Important elements to this mission are: ensuring reliable high performance operation of all its websites and other technical services, globally; ensuring data security and safety; reliance on, and continued development of, free open source software; reliance on interchangeable hardware components that are manufactured to common standards by a range of vendors.  The Director must work with the professional staff and other advisors to strike a balance between ideals, practicality and cost. 

The purpose of Wikimedia projects is to serve a global audience of readers and volunteers, and technical and non-technical users alike.  To ensure that the community is adequately served, the Director will establish standards and measurement systems for responsiveness.  Given the global reach and utilization of Wikimedia projects, and the mission to make all knowledge available to all people, it will be important to be able to compare systems responsiveness to users located in cities large and small, and in towns and rural areas throughout the world. 

The technical infrastructure serves and is made appropriately accessible to various types of staff and volunteer users, some highly technical and some with no technical expertise.  All systems will be architected and managed with an eye toward striking an appropriate balance between accessibility, security and transparency.  All parts of the work of the Technical Operations Department will be appropriately documented, including:  an inventory of all hardware and software, license and warranty information, passwords, hardware and software architecture, documentation of software code, and processes and procedures.  As much of this documentation as possible will be made openly accessible. 

Currently, the Wikimedia Foundation has approximately 40 paid staff.  That number is expected to grow in coming years consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation's scope and impact.  The Operations Department benefits from access to substantial volunteer resources, and currently also has 4.5 full-time-equivalent (FTE) staff that is expected to grow to 9 FTE staff by year’s end.  With the Chief Technical Officer, the Director will hire, supervise, motivate, mentor, develop and evaluate staff, ensuring that staff skills are appropriate to meet the organization’s goals.

This is a roll up your sleeves, participatory organization, and staff and volunteer teams tend to form flexibly around projects.  The Director of Technical Operations should be willing and able to act as an engineer and architect, collaborator, manager, strategist and tactical implementer. 

For a full position description or more information, please contact Mark Oppenheim at  . Additional information on the organization can be found at http://wikimediafoundation.org.