This list contains only the countries for which job offers have been published in the selected language (e.g., in the French version, only job offers written in French are displayed, and in the English version, only those in English).
GitHub is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Developer Experience (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.
Job Responsibility
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
Requirements
11+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline
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
Experience building and operating production CI/CD or release pipelines for complex distributed systems
Enterprise experience contributing technical solutions to high throughput services in production environments, such as systems profiling tools and distributed systems performance tuning
Experience with Linux-based systems, containers, and software packaging or artifact delivery
Experience troubleshooting build, test, and release failures across multiple layers of the stack
Proven ability to improve engineering systems through automation, observability, and process simplification
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, or related field
Nice to have
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