Principal Software Engineer - Search

About GitHub

As the global home for all developers, GitHub is the complete AI-powered developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 100 million people, including developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to build amazing things together across 330+ million repositories. With all the collaborative features of GitHub, it has never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code. **

Locations**

In this role you can work from Remote, United States **

Overview**

GitHub is changing the way the world builds software, and we want you to help! We’re looking for a Principal level Software Engineer to join the Code Search team.

More of the world’s development data lives on GitHub than anywhere else. Helping developers navigate and understand that data is a core part of GitHub’s mission, and an area with significant potential we’ve only begun to realize. We have high aspirations for how we can help developers understand and navigate code, and for making collaboration more seamless. The foundation for these efforts is our highly scalable code search engine, which we are now expanding to help power semantic/vector search to better support many of GitHub’s AI experiences.

In this role, you will have the opportunity to be part of the team that’s reinventing the platform and infrastructure that millions of developers depend on for -- re-thinking everything from the experience to the system architecture supporting it. You will be involved in the design, rollout, and support of a highly performant, highly scalable and highly available search platform with your team. Code search, semantic search and AI are a complex, cutting edge problem space and you will help your senior team navigate uncertainty and make effective implementation tradeoff decisions, relying on careful reasoning and decision making around a significant infrastructure budget.

Together we are creating the tools and products that are integral to how people build software. We pride ourselves on being thoughtful, intentional, and productive. We value learning, introspection and reflection, and we’re always looking for ways to improve as a team and as individuals. **

Responsibilities**

• Work with the team to understand technical constraints, and develop, communicate, and track against realistic plans to consistently ship products, features, and bug fixes
• Coordinate with engineering and product leadership to define and prioritize projects that help us meet business objectives
• Ensure the team builds software that is architecturally consistent and of high quality to reliably meet customer needs
• Support a highly available service used by millions of users on a daily basis
• Help cultivate an environment where team members are empowered and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and belonging
• Help ensure that individuals on the team are learning, growing and advancing in their respective careers
• Mentor, pair, and delegate work to encourage the professional and technical growth of your team and those around you

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Proficiency in Rust, C or C++ and proficiency in systems programming, search index internals and information retrieval
• 8+ years experience designing, building, scaling and maintaining large-scale distributed systems
• 6+ years experience designing and implementing data structures and algorithms
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with vector database internals, ANN search and AI based retrieval a plus
• Passionate about fostering good engineering practices and processes
• Experience effectively contributing to technical strategy and roadmaps
• Solid understanding of testing principles and high quality software
• Understanding of production system monitoring and observability
• Troubleshooting skills across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage and distributed services layers.
• Excellent analytical skills as well as communication skills both verbal and written. We’re a distributed team so we’re extra mindful about communication.
• Strong customer focus and data driven approach

Compensation Range

USD $134,800.00 - USD $357,500.00 /Yr.

In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role.

These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role. **

GitHub values**

• Customer-obsessed
• Ship to learn
• Growth mindset
• Own the outcome
• Better together
• Diverse and inclusive

Manager fundamentals

• Model
• Coach
• Care

Leadership principles

• Create clarity
• Generate energy
• Deliver success

Who We Are

GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 100 million developers and counting. We’re also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world’s software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.

Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We’re remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.

Join us, and let’s change the world, together. **

EEO Statement**

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!