ABOUT JOB

EditOur vision

Imagine a world where anyone can easily learn how to do anything. A world where access to comprehensive step-by-step instructions in multiple languages enables billions of people to improve their lives, in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. That’s the world we want to create.

wikiHow is the only company in the Comscore top 100 that has under 25 employees. So far, wikiHow helps millions of people a day in 13 languages, but we have ambitions to push our mission much further. We will be more than the “Wikipedia for how-to”. We’re looking for a few talented, collaborative, delightful employees with an interest in education to join our cause. Are you in?

EditWhere

wikiHow is located in a homey office in downtown Palo Alto, California, three blocks from the Palo Alto Caltrain Station. We also have satellite offices in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington.

EditWhy we’re different than your other career options

• We take wikiHow's educational mission seriously. We put our mission above short-term business goals.
• We're full of that rare breed of humble, high performers.
• Each of us is insanely productive. Our small team of 21 people is competing with mega corporations with hundreds of employees. And beating them:
  
• We have a huge number of users, but a very small team. Your work will make an immediate, noticeable impact on millions of people.
• We all work from home one day a week.
• We don't think working long start-up hours is productive or healthy. We work hard and productively, then go enjoy rich lives outside of work.
• Our small, cohesive team is gender balanced: 50% female, 50% male.
• We’re often wrong (and that’s OK). Making mistakes shows that we are innovating. We love to innovate.
• We like walking. We even have a few treadmill desks.
• We love coming to work every day. Working with intelligent people to accomplish something globally ambitious is intrinsically satisfying.
• We like to share. We develop open source software and Creative Commons licensed content.
• Alexa and Comscore rank us in the top 100 sites in the US. Even your mom will use and love our product.
• We are profitable and growing.
• We are self-funded. We refuse VC money on a regular basis. Investors don’t make our decisions, we do.
• We pay top performers well.
• We are better in person than on TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdfGsYyALI
• We're delightfully quirky (but you probably figured that out already).

A few benefits

A warning

A WARNING: wikiHow is not hoping to be acquired or looking for a quick financial exit. We're already profitable, financially stable, and we all love working here, so we aren't in a rush to sell out. Selling might mean the end to a product that we all love working on. It is an amazing feeling to work on such a popular, high impact product! That amazing feeling makes us smile when we wake up every day. If all of this sounds appealing to you, we encourage you to apply. If this is a bummer, then that’s okay too, we probably aren't the best fit for you right now, and that’s totally fine!

EditOpen Positions

Product Manager, Written Content

Business operations, management, and content editing merge together into this role at wikiHow. The person in this role will manage multiple teams of people to get more done, faster than most people think is possible. The product manager will do some of the following jobs:

• Envision and build new forms of written media.
• Recruit and lead teams of writers, editors, and researchers.
• Manage our editorial fellow program, which is our career rotational program we offer journalism school graduates.
• Build other teams running efficient processes both in and out of the company.
• Contribute to wikiHow’s leadership team in areas outside of your core responsibilities.
• Be loved and respected by your happy, insanely productive teams.

You should have a track record of success in your previous business operations or managerial editing jobs to show you can be successful here too.

How to apply: Share your cover letter and resume with jobs@wikiHow.com over Google Drive. Set the privacy settings on your documents as “viewable by anyone with the link,” as we will share it around the office. In your cover letter, tell us why you think you are the best person for this position.

Product Manager, Video

• The ability to envision and produce a high volume of high-quality videos to supplement how-to written content
• Fundamental understanding of film production and post-production: composition, frame rates, segment length, audio, lighting etc.
• Knowledge of web video output codecs and optimization for web based productions
• Experience working in a team of editors and videographers or managing a team of contractors working on video assets
• Experience in workflow production management and streamlining
• Project planning, collaboration, and communication abilities
• Ability to proof and/or write both technical and creative scripts and storyboard is a plus
• Ability to multitask and prioritize projects
• A “can do” attitude that keeps you from letting tools or setbacks get in your way of producing excellent works whether it be a quick social media format style video, or a high-quality commercial video
• Skilled with Final Cut, Premiere, Photoshop

How to apply: Share your cover letter and resume with jobs@wikiHow.com over Google Drive. Set the privacy settings on your documents as “viewable by anyone with the link,” as we will share it around the office. In your cover letter, tell us why you think you are the best person for this position.

Project Management

wikiHow is hiring a project manager to expand an area of wikiHow that our users love. Your product will meaningfully impact the lives of over a million people every day. You will have the leadership position and full responsibility for this product. You will work independently at first but eventually hire a team of people to accelerate the project.

Job Requirements

• You are that rare bird that is a high performer, while still humble.
• You are amazingly smart, creative, passionate, detail oriented, action oriented and pragmatic, all at the same time.
• You have a good eye for identifying great products or great experiences on the Internet. You don’t mind experimenting to find the best solution.
• You are one of those people who is really good at getting lots of stuff done and you are proud of what you do.
• You are committed to even the menial parts of completing a project.
• You are fun to work with, and you don’t take yourself too seriously.
• A passion or at least a strong ability in writing, educating, and reading will be helpful in this job.
• We don’t care what you majored in at college. Great achievers come from all areas.
• Bonus points if you've accomplished something significant in your life. Maybe you built a business, crushed a charity fundraising goal, paid your way through college, climbed El Capitan, danced 24 hours straight, roller bladed across Montana, etc. It could be anything, but accomplishing it will show us your ability to achieve a goal.

How to apply: Share your cover letter and resume with jobs@wikiHow.com over Google Drive. Set the privacy settings on your documents as “viewable by anyone with the link,” as we will share it around the office. In your cover letter, tell us why you think you are the best person for this position.

Engineering

We have a six-person engineering team and over 40 million users. That’s more than 8 million users per engineer! Everything you build will make an immediate impact on millions of people.

Some of the problems wikiHow engineers are working on:

• Building user-facing features for our volunteer editing community that are fun enough to gather mass usage, while simultaneously making sure the output of the work produces high-quality educational information. It’s easy to get people to upload funny cat memes on the Web; the real challenge comes when you want them to create and curate the world’s best instructional content.
• Creating features to bring in new content contributors. To keep growing and achieve our goals, we solve how to enable contributors from mobile devices, as well as continuing to gain new desktop community members.
• Scaling, scaling, scaling. We get more users before 10 AM than most start-ups will get in their entire existence.
• Big data. Lots of usage creates lots of data that we work with to further improve our products.
• Mobile and tablets. The majority of wikiHow users will soon be on portable devices, but they don’t practice typical behavior patterns. We are rethinking wikis and collaboratively created content for the mobile era.
• Reader delight features. Better software means happier readers. We’re inventing new ways to make learning pleasant and more efficient.
• Your awesome idea! We value our employees' ideas and opinions, and most of our projects originate from people on the team.

Our stack: PHP, MediaWiki, MySQL, Bash, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Python, C++, Memcache, Varnish, Nginx, Linux, iOS, Android. This is a partial list, because we also explore and test new technologies.

We’re looking for full-stack engineers, and are hiring people with a variety of experience levels and technology interests.

Apply at engineering-jobs@wikihow.com

Other

Other jobs may be available. Apply at jobs@wikiHow.com.