Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

05 Mar 2014, 23:25 p.m.

Open Source Jobs (We're Hiring)

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which employs me, is hiring, a lot. We need your help to:

    Wikimedia Foundation 2013 All Hands Offsite - Day 1 - Photo 23, by Fabrice Florin, for the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikimedia Foundation) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
  1. write code to try new ways to encourage people to edit Wikipedia (Growth engineer)
  2. keep our users' data safe (operations security engineer)
  3. make sure our designers and multimedia engineers build the right things (multimedia product manager)
  4. help other Wikimedians figure out how to design their outreach and mentoring initiatives better and evaluate them for effectiveness, so we learn what works (program evaluation community coordinator)
  5. automate more of the systems that help developers test new code to find bugs early (Test Infrastructure Engineer)
  6. like 14 other jobs, seriously, we're hiring a lot

And of course everything you make at the Wikimedia Foundation is freely licensed, so you can suggest your buddies use it to solve their problems, write public blog posts about it, talk about it at parties and conferences, and link to it on your résumé. Isn't open source rockin'?

(Many WMF workers, including me, telecommute. You might also like our Pluralism, internationalism, and diversity policy.)

Some other places that make open source software or free culture and are hiring: Linaro, MongoDB, Participatory Culture Foundation, CollectionSpace, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Mozilla, Kaltura, Boundless, Acquia, OpenStack-using companies, Varnish Software, Red Hat, InkTank, wikiHow, the libraries and similar institutions seeking Wikimedians/Wikipedians in Residence, Canonical, Collabora, the Linux Foundation, Eucalyptus, New York Public Library Labs, Pro Publica, Nebula, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation.

That's just a fraction of who's hiring. You can check the FSF jobs board, OPW's list and the liberationtech-jobs mailing list for more.

If you're looking specifically for internships, the OpenHatch list, Google Summer of Code, and Outreach Program for Women should help you.


This is a followup to a similar post I made in late 2012. Erik Moeller and Sumana Harihareswara at Hackathon Mumbai 2011 -18, by Victorgrigas (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons