Principal Production Engineer

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

GitHub is the home for software development, helping millions of developers and organizations build, ship, and operate software together. As software development becomes increasingly AI-assisted, the reliability, scalability, and operability of our platform have never been more important.

We're building a new Production Engineering organization to help raise the operational bar across GitHub. Production Engineers are software engineers who embed with product and infrastructure teams to improve reliability, performance, scalability, and developer productivity through software, automation, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will:

• Embed with engineering teams to improve the reliability, scalability, and operability of GitHub's production systems.
• Own complex production problems end-to-end, from debugging live incidents to designing long-term engineering solutions.
• Design, build, and operate software and infrastructure that improves how GitHub runs in production.
• Partner with product and infrastructure teams to improve observability, capacity planning, performance, resiliency, and operational readiness.
• Write and review production-quality code, automate operational workflows, and eliminate repetitive manual work.
• Participate in incident response and help drive learning through incident reviews and follow-up engineering investments.
• Influence technical direction across teams by establishing engineering practices that improve operational excellence at scale.
• Mentor engineers and help build Production Engineering as a technical discipline within GitHub.

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.

• Experience designing, operating, and debugging large-scale distributed systems, with a proven ability to drive improvements in high availability, automation, observability, and overall system reliability.
• Strong software engineering experience in one or more modern programming languages such as Go, Rust, C++, Java, Python, or C#.
• Experience with Linux, networking fundamentals, and systems performance.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating services at scale.
• Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, service networking, databases, or distributed storage systems.
• Experience leading incident response and driving operational improvements across organizations.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity and software quality.
• Experience building engineering practices that improve reliability, operational excellence, or developer productivity across multiple teams.

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.

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 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!