Compensation Overview

About GitHub

As the global home for all developers, GitHub is the complete AI-powered developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 100 million people, including developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to build amazing things together across 330+ million repositories. With all the collaborative features of GitHub, it has never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code.

Locations

In this role you can work from Remote, United States

Overview

GitHub is revolutionizing the way developers collaborate and build software, and we are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to pioneer the UI Platform space, which entails areas of frontend performance, accessibility, consistency, and availability. This role is pivotal to defining GitHub’s future UI architecture, ensuring accessibility for all users, delivering an exceptional user interface, enhancing developer experience, and positioning GitHub as a leader in UI innovation, thereby empowering millions of developers worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural design and development of GitHub’s web UI platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, accessibility, and performance.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and prioritize projects aimed at enhancing GitHub’s user experience.

• Establish best practices, patterns, and guidelines for frontend development, fostering a culture of excellence and innovation.

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to frontend engineering teams, promoting continuous learning and growth.

• Drive initiatives to improve engineering processes, tooling, and automation to streamline development workflows.

• Champion accessibility, performance, and usability standards, ensuring that GitHub’s web interfaces are accessible to all users and optimized for performance.

• Stay abreast of emerging frontend technologies, trends, and best practices, advocating for their adoption when beneficial to GitHub’s development ecosystem.

• Collaborate with product management and design teams to translate user needs and business requirements into technical solutions.

• Serve as a subject matter expert on web UI development, representing GitHub in industry conferences, forums, and technical communities.

A week in the life of a Principal Engineer might consist of:

• Collaborating with other Principal Engineers to define the future of GitHub engineering and working together to implement that vision

• Collaborating with design, analytics, support, and product management to understand the problems we want to solve and exploring how we can solve them

• Digging into the most important issues the department is tackling by asking questions, creating plans, recognizing pitfalls, raising concerns, and creating clarity

• Discussing and collaboratively solving engineering and product problems with engineering collaborators in Slack or Zoom

• Planning and executing large-scale company-wide rollouts and migrations

• Supporting company-wide initiatives

• Bringing key plans and execution ideas to the management team

• Mentoring other engineers at all experience levels

• Providing comprehensive and high quality code or design reviews when requested by other teams at GitHub

• Reviewing teammates’ Pull Requests and providing helpful feedback

• Serve as an engineering representative for critical customer conversations to discover what they love and what their pain points are

• Embedding in a squad periodically to enable others to tackle challenges and stretch assignments

• As a part of Engineering technical leadership, advising on key initiatives, gaps, and technical pitfalls we need to be aware of

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of professional experience in frontend development, with a strong proficiency in modern JavaScript frameworks (especially React) and with the last 4 years in a senior technical role (e.g. Staff / Principal or equivalent)

• 7+ years of experience in designing, building, and maintaining large-scale frontend applications and the backend systems that support these with an emphasis on performance, scalability, and maintainability.

• 7+ years of providing technical leadership and mentorship, guiding teams to deliver high-quality software solutions, demonstrating a proactive bias for action in ensuring timely execution of projects and initiatives.

• 3+ years of experience constructing APIs for front-end applications OR proficiency consuming those APIs while leveraging associated client libraries like Apollo, TRPC, Relay, etc.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience navigating how different concerns within the frontend engineering space overlap (e.g. accessibility, performance, UX consistency) and crafting execution strategies that successfully take these areas into consideration and lead to meaningful and impactful deliverables.

• Deep expertise and knowledge of the inner workings of React and related technologies

• Passionate and active in the evolution of current front-end architecture trends and best practices, encompassing performance, accessibility, security, and usability.

• Extensive experience with TypeScript and other statically typed languages, Node.js, the Web platform, and UI architecture

• Experience with large-scale codebases with contributors that span teams, offices and time zones

• Prior experience with Ruby on Rails or other backend technologies.

• Proficiency in using and customizing build tools and automation frameworks, such as Webpack.

• Prior experience articulating complex technical concepts to both technical (engineers at all levels) and non-technical (stakeholders and executives) audiences

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $134,800.00 - USD $357,500.00 /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 100 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!