Key Facts

Remote From:

United States

Full time

Expert & Leadership (>10 years)

160 - 425K yearly

English

Hard Skills

Other Skills

•
Social Collaboration
•
Communication
•
Critical Thinking
•
Mentorship
•
Empathy

Roles & Responsibilities

11+ years of software engineering experience delivering production software.
Proficiency in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
Alternative education paths with corresponding experience: Associate’s degree with 10+ years; Bachelor’s with 9+ years; Master’s with 7+ years; PhD with 5+ years in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with emphasis on reliability, availability, and performance.

Requirements:

Lead and influence system architecture design for complex products and solutions, ensuring security, compliance, and performance requirements.
Establish and mentor best practices for testing, performance tuning, and code quality, defining success metrics and ensuring maintainability across dependencies.
Provide technical leadership during code reviews to ensure reliability, scalability, and alignment with product goals.
Partner with product managers and technical leads to define service requirements and incorporate feedback into future designs.

Job description

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 Principal Software Engineer to help shape the future of our core platform infrastructure. In this critical leadership position, you'll drive system architecture for our most critical services, inspire and coach engineering teams, and deliver solutions that keep GitHub running for millions of developers worldwide.

We're looking for someone with deep expertise in building and operating large-scale distributed systems—someone who thrives on solving hard problems around reliability, availability, and performance at massive scale. You have a proven track record of tackling complex technical challenges with creativity and pragmatism, and you excel in highly collaborative, cross-functional environments.

Our team focuses on the systems that power GitHub at scale, ensuring our platforms remain stable, secure, and performant under extreme load. As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll work alongside a globally distributed team of talented engineers and managers to enhance and scale our most critical infrastructure, delivering an exceptional experience to our diverse and growing customer base.

You'll lead by example—both through your own technical contributions and by mentoring others. You'll guide technical strategy, influence architectural decisions, and drive performance optimization across teams. Our culture is built on developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration. Here, curiosity and a drive for impact are at the heart of everything we do.

Join us to help shape the future of software development and make a difference for millions of developers around the world.

Responsibilities:

Lead and influence system architecture design for complex products and solutions, ensuring they meet security, compliance, and performance requirements.
Establish and mentor best practices for testing, performance tuning, and code quality, defining success metrics and ensuring maintainability across dependencies.
Provide technical leadership during code reviews to ensure reliability, scalability, and alignment with product goals.
Partner with product managers and technical leads to define service requirements and incorporate feedback into future designs.
Act as an expert in debugging tools and methods, leading proactive and reactive development to resolve issues across teams.
Optimize deployments and runtime performance to meet business objectives, ensuring safe rollouts aligned with GitHub's standards.
Drive improvements in development quality and team performance through tooling, automation, and knowledge sharing.
Lead product refinement through telemetry analysis, performance metrics, and experimentation frameworks to inform engineering decisions.
Develop strategies to identify and mitigate technical risks, including frameworks for risk assessment and contingency planning.
Shape the strategic vision for technology and product development, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives aligned with GitHub's long-term goals.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications:

11+ 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 10+ 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 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, 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 PhD 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 equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience with cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services
Understanding of production system monitoring and observability
Ability to think critically about both system design and software engineering concepts and blend those perspectives pragmatically based on project needs
Demonstrated experience with large-scale system architecture and design, particularly in cloud-based environments, with a strong understanding of distributed systems and microservices
Experience working closely with product management, design, and other engineering teams to drive cross-functional projects and deliver high-quality product

Compensation Range: The base salary range for this job is USD $160,200.00 - USD $425,000.00 /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

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 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!

Ready to apply?

APPLY

Share ·