Dear all,

We are excited to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation now has a Vice President of Engineering. Damon Sicore will be filling this vital role. Please join us in welcoming him to the team.

The VPE role will be crucial to further developing and maintaining the technology that supports the very core of the Wikimedia movement, and ensuring the development, scale, and stability of the MediaWiki architecture.

Damon joins us as part of planned growth of our product and engineering teams, first announced in November 2012. As we have grown, we need dedicated focus on product and engineering as separate departments, to ensure development of best practices like performance engineering, continuous delivery, A/B testing, software re-architecture, UI/UX work, and user research. Erik Moeller, who filled the role of VP for both product and engineering since 2011, led in the creation of this new role and was essential to the search process.  From today onward, Erik will focus on his role as VP of Product and Strategy and Deputy Director of the WMF, while Damon will take over leadership of the Engineering team; both will report to me as part of the c-level team.

Damon has a unique track record of managing large platform rollouts using distributed teams like ours, while understanding the essential role of community contributions and working in a transparent, open source environment. These skills and experiences will be invaluable in his work here at the Foundation. It’s unusual to find someone who understands us so well, and so I want to thank the many people from across the organization, especially in the engineering, product, and human resources teams, who have been involved in making this search successful.

We are very happy to have Damon on board. His proven track record of managing large platform rollouts using distributed teams like ours, while understanding the essential role of community contributions and working in a transparent, open source environment, is unique and invaluable as part of our movement.

We’ll be sending around a copy of the press release shortly. You’ll also be be able to meet Damon, and ask him questions, this Thursday at our monthly Metrics Meeting. Please join us there!

Please join me in welcoming Damon.

Lila