Group Product Manager, Data Platforms

Summary

Wikipedia and its sister projects are among the most popular media properties in the world, visited by over 1 billion people a month across over 300 different languages. These sites generate a tremendous amount of data on how people learn and collaborate. The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a group product manager to guide the development and evolution of our data platforms, the collection of technologies we use to understand how Wikipedia works, improve its experiences, and spread free knowledge.

The group product manager is a leader in the strategic decision-making and tactical execution for the Data Engineering, Experimentation, Search, and Data Platform Site Reliability teams. This role shares leadership responsibility with the Director of Engineering for Data Platform Engineering, and works in collaboration with data analysts, researchers, and product teams building user-facing features for reading and editing Wikipedia on the web and mobile apps. This is a people management role, managing two individually-contributing product managers.

In this role, you and your group of product managers will guide the evolution of our data pipelines, data lake, experiment platform, and analytics tools. This includes ingestion, orchestration, computation, and serving data using a variety of technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Hadoop, Spark, Airflow, Iceberg, Kubernetes, Superset, dbt, and OpenSearch. A strong candidate will have deep experience building a data platform to serve product analytics and production needs, and be technically conversant in the relevant technologies.

This position will report to the Senior Director of Product, Core Experiences.

Candidates must be available for critical meetings and synchronous work between 15:00 UTC and 18:00 UTC, and open to traveling internationally up to four times per year.

This role is accountable for

Ensuring the accuracy, usefulness, reliability, and accessibility of our data products

Defining and setting priorities and roadmaps for Data Platform Engineering teams across four domains: data engineering, search, experimentation, and site reliability

Product lifecycle management of the products, services, and tools of the Data Platform Engineering teams

Co-developing product strategy, providing leadership, and making and facilitating sound decisions

Managing and developing a team of product managers

Partnering with user-facing product teams to use the data platform to guide product decisions and build derived-data products

Expected skills and experience include

Minimum of 5 years of product management experience with data or infrastructure products

Experience hiring and managing product managers

Success delivering data and analytical products and services depended on by multiple product teams

Expertise in data analytics, A/B testing, search, and data architecture

Strong understanding of modern techniques for handling high-scale data

Knowledge of search technologies

Experience navigating privacy issues around data collection, retention, and distribution

Ability to work with multiple stakeholder teams to deliver results through lateral influence and collaboration

Qualities that are important to us

Commitment to the mission and values of the Wikimedia Foundation

Effective at asynchronous communication in a distributed workplace

Able to navigate and make decisions in circumstances with limited, incomplete, and conflicting information

Focus on iterative delivery and minimum viability to provide value to customer teams

Effective at clear, written communication for strategy, plans, roadmaps, and decisions, for a wide range of audiences including individual contributor engineers, volunteer contributors, and department leadership

Additionally, we would love it if you have

Experience with open source, open data, or open knowledge communities

Experience building products for multiple languages and geographies.

Experience with the integration of machine learning or artificial intelligence into web products.

Experience editing Wikipedia or with the Wikipedia, Wikidata, or Wikimedia Commons communities or other collaborative enterprises

Open source software development experience

Familiarity with MediaWiki

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

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