Staff Software Engineer

Staff Engineer

The Pathfinders team owns the paved path for how GitHub builds and ships services. We build the tooling, automation, and golden-path templates that let hundreds of services across the company stay secure, up to date, and production-ready without their owners doing the heavy lifting. Our work spans the full software development lifecycle: from scaffolding and standardizing new services, to fleet-wide agentic systems that use AI to automatically detect drift, open fixes, and upgrade services at scale, to infrastructure migrations that keep the platform healthy. We operate primarily in Go, think in terms of leverage over toil, and measure success by how much friction we remove for every other engineer at GitHub. If you like building developer-facing platforms where a single change can improve the daily experience of thousands of engineers, this is the team.

Set the technical direction for the platform that every engineer at GitHub builds on. Our team owns the internal developer platform: the paved paths services adopt to build safely, the cloud and local environments engineers write code in, and the automation and chat-driven tooling that keeps the fleet healthy. We are increasingly putting agents and Copilot to work on the operational grind so humans can spend their time on harder problems.

In this role you will shape how thousands of engineers do their daily work. The problems here are broad and rarely have a clean answer. You will decide what the paved path should look like and convince the rest of the company to walk it, untangle developer platform and environment systems that have grown gnarly over years, and figure out where agents can safely take over toil and where they cannot yet be trusted. The work spans organizational boundaries, touches nearly every service GitHub runs, and operates at a scale where the pragmatic call usually beats the elegant one.

We are looking for a staff engineer with a track record of cross-organizational impact: someone who has driven technical change well beyond a single team, can go deep on genuinely hard problems, and raises the bar for engineering craft wherever they work. You will balance hard stakeholder conversations, find the most pragmatic path through ambiguous tradeoffs, and own large architectures end to end. We care about culture as much as reliability, and we believe that how we do things is as important as what we do. Great infrastructure reflects the teams that build it.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the team's technical direction across the developer platform, from paved paths and developer environments to operational automation
• Lead the design and delivery of large, ambitious architectures that cross team and organizational boundaries, breaking them into pragmatic increments that ship value early
• Set the standard for engineering excellence across the company through architecture briefs, prototypes, code experiments, and the patterns you put in front of other teams
• Navigate hard stakeholder conversations, align partners on contentious tradeoffs, and turn competing priorities into a clear, defensible technical plans
• Push agentic and Copilot-driven approaches into operational work, deciding where automation earns trust and where it does not yet belong
• Write, review, and maintain production code primarily in Go and Ruby, and stay close enough to the systems to make credible technical calls
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response, diagnosing and resolving production issues under pressure and feeding what you learn back into the platform
• Grow the engineers around you through mentorship, pairing, code review, and the example you set for tackling hard problems

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
• 5+ years of experience with backend systems, infrastructure, or platform engineering

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience working remotely as part of a distributed software engineering team
• A track record of cross-organizational impact: setting technical direction, raising engineering standards, and influencing how other teams build
• Strength in hard stakeholder conversations: aligning partners, navigating contentious tradeoffs, and committing to a defensible plan
• Interest in applying agentic and Copilot-driven approaches to operational and reliability work
• Experience with Go, Ruby, or similar languages in a production infrastructure context
• Comfort with on-call rotations and incident response in a high-availability environment
• Demonstrated technical leadership on large, cross-team initiatives, with a record of driving change beyond a single team

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. This position will be open for a minimum of 3 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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