Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer at 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.

In this role, you can work from Remote, United States.

Overview

GitHub is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the DX team and help shape the future of our Engineering organization. In this critical leadership position, you’ll drive system architecture, inspire and coach engineering teams, and deliver innovative solutions that make a real impact.

We’re looking for someone with deep expertise in building and tuning scalable, high-performance systems—someone who thrives on optimizing high-throughput services at scale. You have a proven track record of solving complex technical challenges with creativity and pragmatism, and you excel in highly collaborative, cross-functional environments.

In DX, our mission is to empower GitHub developers to do their best work while ensuring our platforms are stable, secure, and reliable in an ever-evolving ecosystem. As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll work alongside a globally distributed team of talented engineers and managers to enhance and scale our products, delivering an exceptional experience to our diverse and growing customer base.

You’ll lead by example—both through your own technical contributions and by mentoring others. You’ll guide technical strategy, influence architectural decisions, and drive performance optimization across teams. Our culture is built on developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration. Here, curiosity and a drive for impact are at the heart of everything we do.

Join us to help shape the future of software development and make a difference for millions of developers around the world.

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

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in AKS and Azure management services.
• 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 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 $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.

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!

Key skills/competency

• System Architecture
• Scalability
• High-Performance Systems
• Distributed Systems
• Performance Tuning
• Debugging
• Telemetry Analysis
• Technical Leadership
• Code Quality
• Risk Mitigation