Kiwix is the leading offline solution for people who cannot access internet content – be it because of data cost, low connectivity, or outright censorship. It is free, and open-source.
Simply put, our software copies the entirety of websites that can then be downloaded as zim files and stored locally : for example, we made the entirety of English Wikipedia’s 6.5 million articles fit on a regular cell phone. The Kiwix reader then allows users to browse that content anywhere, anytime.
The Wikimedia Foundation is one of our main sponsors, but we also work with orgs from around the world. We have about 8-10 million users, and seeing that nearly 4 billion people have poor internet access we are confident that we are just starting our journey. Kiwix is used every day in West-African schools, US prisons, Indian universities or even Antarctic bases. Where there is no internet, there is Kiwix !
The job
We are looking for a Python Developer to join our engineering team and help us develop and maintain various software products in two domains: web-based online tools and scrapers that will help us expand our library of available websites available offline. You can see many of them already done at https://code.openzim.org
This position is mentored by a senior developer but you will be in charge of full projects and to a large extent work on your own. As such, excellent self-organisation and project design and architecture skills are expected.
Responsibilities
- Architecturing solutions and discussing them with peers. You will need to be able to explain your choices;
- Writing clear, effective, scalable code in Python3
- Developing back-end components to improve response time and overall performance
- Integrating user-facing elements into applications
- Packaging solutions to the point they are ready to use by others (this is free software, we encourage others to inspect, use, and modify our code)
- Testing and documenting solutions (in a manner that not just senior developers will understand)
- Communicating clearly, quickly and transparently with the rest of the team and users via Github
Requirements and skills
- Work experience as a Python Developer (at least 5 years)
- Familiarity with front-end technologies (JavaScript, HTML5, CSS)
- Good understanding of the HTTP protocol
- No strong expertise with any framework is expected but a fast learning capacity is.
- Good Team spirit and excellent communication skills
- Experience with managing a FOSS project/community is highly rated.
- Preferred BSc in Computer Science, Engineering or relevant field
- Very good communication skills in English, French is nice to have
Benefits
- Fully remote job with flexible work times
- Very senior and stable dev team
- At least one in-person hackathon per year, usually in a cool place around Europe
- This is a genuinely impactful project – we do make a difference.
Compensation
As the job is remote we expect applicants from around the world to reach out. We are not looking to pit coders against each other so we will look at local compensation rates and roll with that.
Interested?
Then send us your CV and, if you have one, a link to a public repository where we can have a look at your code -> jobs at kiwix.org