Principal Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

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.

Overview

GitHub is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our Database Infrastructure team. We're a team that focuses on ensuring the reliability and scalability of the databases that power GitHub. The Database platform is home to hundreds of terabytes of unique data, serving over 20 million queries per second on average across our fleet. We create self-service infrastructure to empower engineers across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a core part of GitHub’s infrastructure, work to scale our database solution.
• Be a subject matter expert on MySQL and database administration within GitHub.
• Cultivate open source projects developed at GitHub and build things you are proud to share.
• Design, develop and maintain tooling for operating database systems and self-service tooling for GitHub developers.
• Write technical documentation on how to use internal tooling and best practices for leveraging MySQL.
• Escalate risks and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to incidents as needed.
• Develop and design plans for disaster recovery and systems failovers.

The team is highly distributed across geographies and timezones, and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication.

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.
• 3+ years experience in using monitoring tooling to diagnose performance or availability issues.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Excitement about building, operating, and maintaining resilient, scalable systems that impact a global community of users with the ability to break down complex systems into manageable components.
• Drive for observability to understand performance and be able to diagnose problems.
• Effective communication skills and willingness to pair on problems, brainstorm in public, and enthusiastically engage with your teammates in group problem solving.
• Experience writing design docs and getting consensus on technical decisions from a broader group.
• Familiarity with database internals and experience with change management (especially database migrations).

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.

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!

Key skills/competency

• Database Infrastructure
• Principal Software Engineer
• MySQL
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Production Software
• Software Engineering
• System Design
• Disaster Recovery
• Monitoring Tools