Overview
As part of this team, you will work on mission-critical platform services that power GitHub's global developer ecosystem. The team owns and operates high-scale distributed systems, including GitHub Packages, GitHub Pages, Email Services, and other foundational developer experience tools and platforms. These services support billions of requests, stringent reliability requirements, and developer workflows used worldwide.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for some of GitHub's most challenging scale, reliability, and operational excellence initiatives. You will lead design and implementation, make sound architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and collaborate across GitHub and Microsoft to deliver durable platform capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, development, and operation of highly available distributed systems that power critical GitHub platform services.
- Drive architecture and technical direction for scalable backend services and platform capabilities using modern engineering practices, automation, and observability.
- Define and deliver improvements to service reliability, performance, latency, capacity, security, and operational efficiency for mission-critical workloads.
- Own complex features and services throughout their lifecycle, from requirements and design reviews through implementation, rollout, production support, and live-site excellence.
- Build automation and reusable platform capabilities that reduce operational overhead and improve engineering productivity across teams.
- Lead investigations of complex production issues across distributed systems, storage, networking, and service infrastructure, and drive durable corrective actions.
- Partner with engineers and stakeholders across GitHub and Microsoft to align technical strategy and deliver large-scale platform investments and modernization efforts.
- Mentor engineers, raise engineering standards through design and code reviews, and leverage AI-assisted workflows to improve software delivery, testing, incident response, and operational excellence.
Qualifications
Required
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production systems.
- Expert coding skills in one or more programming languages such as C#, Java, Go, C++, Python, Ruby, or similar, with a track record of delivering maintainable production software.
- Deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, API design, and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Proven experience designing and operating large-scale backend services, cloud systems, or platform infrastructure with high availability and reliability requirements.
- Strong experience with databases, caching systems, messaging technologies, service-oriented architectures, and observability pr
