Job Details

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 150+ million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate and experiment across 420+ 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 looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join its growing Engineering team. This leadership role involves leading system architecture design, coaching engineering teams, and delivering impactful technical solutions.

The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in scalable systems and performance engineering, including tuning and optimizing high-throughput services in production environments. They thrive in cross-functional environments and bring creative, pragmatic solutions to complex engineering challenges.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the GitHub Copilot Platform, you will collaborate with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team of engineers and product managers across GitHub and other partners. The GitHub Copilot Platform is crucial for ensuring the quality, scale, and global expansion of Copilot features, maintaining its industry-leading status, and empowering other GitHub engineering teams with seamless integration.

You will lead through personal contributions and by coaching others, as well as guiding technical strategy, architectural decisions, and performance optimization across teams. Our goal is to continuously enhance AI-powered capabilities within GitHub and beyond, improving and maintaining the platform that integrators depend on in their development cycles. We operate in a culture that values developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration, where curiosity and impact drive everything we build.

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 Doctorate 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.

• Experience contributing technical solutions to high throughput services in production environments, such as systems profiling tools and distributed systems performance tuning.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proven experience designing and operating high-throughput cloud-native distributed systems in production environments.

• Deep understanding of performance profiling, observability, and telemetry-driven optimization, especially in Go or similar languages

• Experience integrating machine learning or generative AI capabilities into production systems.

• Experience driving cross-functional projects in close partnership with product management, design, and engineering teams.

• Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $145,600.00 - USD $386,400.00 /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 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!