Staff Software Engineer, GitHub Actions

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

Role Overview:

GitHub is growing its Engineering team and seeks experienced professionals to elevate our software engineering efforts. As a Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, you will architect and deliver high-performance systems that power collaboration for millions of developers. You will drive technical execution from design through production, leading initiatives across distributed teams.

Within GitHub's ecosystem, Actions powers automation for millions of developers worldwide, enabling them to build, test, and deploy code directly from their repositories. As the backbone of CI/CD workflows across GitHub, Actions processes billions of jobs monthly, from simple builds to complex deployment pipelines spanning multiple environments. Our team owns the core infrastructure and services that make this possible, ensuring reliability at a massive scale. We're a group of engineers passionate about developer productivity, tackling challenges in distributed systems, container orchestration, security, and cloud infrastructure. You'll work alongside talented colleagues who value collaboration, operational excellence, and building products that developers love.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services and become intimately familiar with the systems you build and take pride in writing maintainable code.

• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others; support teams in producing extensible and maintainable code, ensuring integration with downstream dependencies and adherence to quality standards.

• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call for first responder rotations and live incidents.

• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and partner with stakeholders and lead discussions for technical solutions, including design and cost considerations.

• Lead the team in developing comprehensive testing strategies, defining success metrics, and incorporating customer feedback to drive continuous improvement.

• Champion security across GitHub Actions by designing and implementing isolation mechanisms for untrusted code execution, ensuring compliance with enterprise security requirements, and partnering with Security teams to protect against vulnerabilities in our services.

• Champion operational excellence by improving system reliability, reducing incident response times, and establishing best practices for monitoring, alerting, and runbooks across Actions services.

• Drive and support technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring that engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new technologies and methodologies where applicable.

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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• OR equivalent experience.

• Willingness and ability to participate in a rotating on-call schedule, providing 24/7 coverage for 1-2 weeks each quarter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 2+ year(s) technical leadership experience

• 3+ years' experience using general purpose programming languages (e.g., Go, Ruby, or a similar language)

• 3+ years' experience in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, or a similar language)

• Experience building or operating CI/CD systems at scale

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 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!