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
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings>.
Please join us there!
Please join me in welcoming Damon.
Lila