Tech:Organisation

Behind the scenes, there are various volunteers helping to develop MediaWiki extensions, resolve support tasks and manage Miraheze's services and infrastructure. Together, they make a group of system administrators. Volunteers are divided among various teams and can have different toles. This page documents the roles of all groups and their responsibilities.

Nominated Director
At least of the members of Miraheze Limited's Board of Directors is a person nominated by the Technical Team to be their representative. The nominated director is a point of contact within the Technical Team for all kinds of questions and respresents the interests of the Technical Team. They also work with the SRE director to ensure there is sufficient budget to keep the infrastructure running. While not mandatory, the SRE director and nominated director are likely to be the same person (helps to keep the lines short).

Department: Site Reliability Engineering
This is the department that cover the pre-existing technical team members within. The department is responsible for the innovation, security, privacy and administration of IT services, infrastructure and data of Miraheze. Site Reliability Engineering maintains all Miraheze servers and services, develops new extensions for the community, resolves the requests of the community and advises the Board on information security and privacy matters.

Position: Director of Site Reliability Engineering
The Director of Site Reliability Engineering is a member of Site Reliability Engineering, appointed by Miraheze Limited's Board of Directors, to perform day-to-day management of Miraheze's Technical Operations. They maintain contact with the Service Providers, work as the budget holder in accordance with the approvals policy for the technical budget and advise on the larger projects undertaken by members of the department. They also line manage team leads (Engineering Managers) to ensure regular engagement with all members of the wide department and collect their views on organisation-level changes.

Team: Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering
The Infrastructure team ensures Miraheze's services and servers are fast, reliable and secure. MediaWiki being the key product of Miraheze, Infrastructure is responsible for providing all miscellaneous, yet critical services that make MediaWiki reliable, useful, secure and scalable. Infrastructure develops and maintains the virtual servers, relational databases, media storage, automation tooling, configuration management systems, network, continuous integration and continuous delivery, cache stores and observability platforms.

Members of this team are called 'Site Reliability Engineers' but other more appropriate names to accurately describe one persons specialisms in future may be adopted as needed.

Position: Engineering Manager, Infrastructure
The Infrastructure Engineering Manager leads the infrastructure team and ensures:
 * appropriate task management for Infrastructure Team tasks,
 * goals are met and kept on track for Infrastructure,
 * the wellbeing and growth of the Infrastructure team.

The Engineering Manager is appointed by the Director of Site Reliability Engineering and is responsible for ensuring cross-team collaboration and pro-active engagement with other teams and departments.

Position: Site Reliability Engineer, Infrastructure
A Site Reliability Engineer is a member of the Infrastructure team who has root access on all servers across Miraheze. They are responsible for day to day operations on Miraheze such as:
 * ensuring the security and stability of all services,
 * responding to incidents that occur across the platform,
 * deploying, maintaining and monitoring all services.

Team: MediaWiki, Site Reliability Engineering
The MediaWiki team is responsible for offering the MediaWiki core platform and MediaWiki extensions. They develop in-house extensions, maintain the latest stable version of MediaWiki core and extensions, handle the configuration and feature requests from the community and work with Wikimedia (upstream) and other third-parties.

Members of this team are called 'MediaWiki Engineers' but other more appropriate names to accurately describe one persons specialisms in future may be adopted as needed.

Position: Engineering Manager, MediaWiki
The MediaWiki Engineering Manager leads the MediaWiki team and ensures:
 * appropriate task management for MediaWiki Team tasks,
 * goals are met and kept on track for MediaWiki,
 * the wellbeing and growth of the MediaWiki team.

The Engineering Manager is appointed by the Director of Site Reliability Engineering and is responsible for ensuring cross-team collaboration and pro-active engagement with other teams and departments.

Position: Site Reliability Engineer, MediaWiki
A Site Reliability Engineer is a member of the MediaWiki team who has either root access on all servers across Miraheze, or root access on all MediaWiki-deployed servers. They are responsible for day to day operations on Miraheze such as:
 * ensuring the security and stability of all MediaWiki servers,
 * responding to incidents that occur across the platform,
 * deploying, maintaining and monitoring all servicers associated with MediaWiki.

Position: MediaWiki Engineer, MediaWiki


Position: Software Developer, MediaWiki


Cache
Cache Administrators ('cache-admins') is an additional group that allows a system administrator to managing the single layered cache infrastructure, Varnish. The group is currently not used.

Puppet
Puppet is mainly managed by Site Reliability Engineers but there is also a Puppet User ('puppet-users') group that may be requested. The purpose of this group is to allow non-SRE system administrators to manage SSL certificates.