About GitHub:
GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development — powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 180 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate, and more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.
Locations:
In this role you can work from Remote, United States
Overview:
GitHub is seeking a Staff Engineering Manager to join the search engineering team. The Elasticsearch team is responsible for the infrastructure and code that powers the search of Issues, Pull Requests, Projects, Discussions, and more — the backbone of how millions of developers find information across GitHub every day.
Our team manages large-scale Elasticsearch clusters spanning hundreds of terabytes of data, serving hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second, and supporting indexes with billions or trillions of records. We focus on cluster management and scaling, optimizing index creation, repair, and reindexing, ensuring recoverability and mapping integrity, and building API-driven interfaces between relational data and search indexes.
In this role you will be a leader and multiplier within our distributed team who will not only manage people, but also help design, prototype, implement and shape search and non-relational platform solutions at GitHub. You are a confident people manager who is willing to work alongside the team to solve tough problems, leading by example in the use of modern AI software development tools to learn and iterate quickly.
Responsibilities:
- Lead a talented, distributed team of infrastructure and search engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, reliability, and engineering excellence across GitHub's Elasticsearch platform.
- Ensure the team builds software that is architecturally consistent and of high quality, establishing patterns and best practices for the organization.
- Coordinate with engineering and product leads to define, prioritize, and task projects that help us meet business objectives.
- Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others.
- Ensure site availability and performance: act as a leader in incident response, working across teams to diagnose and resolve production issues. Maintain monitoring, disaster recovery plans, and compliance postures.
- Work closely with engineering leadership to guide technical investment and implement technical roadmaps and priorities for the Elasticsearch platform.
A week in the life of a Staff Engineering Manager might consist of:
- Collaborating with other Engineering Managers to define the future of GitHub engineering and working together to implement that vision.
- Digging in to the most important issues the department is tackling by asking questions, creating plans, recognizing pitfalls, and raising concerns.
- Discussing and collaboratively solving engineering and product problems with engineering collaborators in Slack or Zoom/Teams.
- Supporting company-wide initiatives.
- Bringing key plans and execution ideas to the management team.
- Mentoring other engineers at all experience levels.
- Responding to issues and review requests from other teams at GitHub.
- Reviewing your teammates' Pull Requests and providing helpful feedback.
- Serve as an engineering representative for critical customer conversations to discover what they love and what their pain points are.
- Embedding in a squad periodically to enable others to tackle challenges and stretch assignments.
- As a part of Engineering technical leadership, advising on key initiatives, gaps, and technical blind spots.
Qualifications:
Required Qualifications
- 9+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python,
- OR Associate’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python,
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 7+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python,
- OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 5+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python,
- OR Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python,
- OR equivalent experience.
- 3+ years people management experience.
- 4+ years experience with troubleshooting across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage and distributed services layers.
- 4+ years experience in one or more of the following domains: kernels, networking, compilers, software development tools, databases (relational and non-relational), HTTP, virtual machines, containers, security.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Lucene/Apache-based search technologies (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr), including deep understanding of search relevance, scoring, and query optimization.
- Experience with non relational database and document store technologies such as MongoDB, CosmosDB.
- Prior experience being on an oncall rotation and working on live-site incidents for large scale distributed systems. Understanding of production system monitoring and observability.
- Experience with cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
- Ability to think critically about both system design and software engineering concepts and blend those perspectives pragmatically based on project needs.
Compensation Range:
The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /Yr.
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 Leadership Principles:
GitHub values
- Customer-obsessed
- Ship to learn
- Growth mindset
- Own the outcome
- Better together
- Diverse and inclusive
Manager fundamentals
Leadership principles
- Create clarity
- Generate energy
- Deliver success
Who We Are:
GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 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!
