Staff Software Engineer Cloud Foundations

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 changing the way the world builds software, and we want you to help lead this effort.

The Cloud Foundations team owns and operates the foundational compute infrastructure that powers GitHub, today and as we move to Azure. We are responsible for the systems other engineering teams build on every day: our internal VM platform, fleet lifecycle automation, configuration management, base OS and container image pipelines, and the fleet inventory and discovery layer that ties it all together. Looking forward, we are also building GitHub's Azure paved paths so product teams can ship on event-driven compute, and cloud-native patterns. Our mission is to build the cloud-native platform GitHub runs on next while safely evolving and retiring the data center services that brought us here.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Cloud Foundations Team, you will work closely with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team of engineers to lead the technical direction of a platform that hundreds of internal teams depend on. You will design and implement systems that span hypervisor lifecycle, configuration management, image pipelines, infrastructure orchestration, fleet automation, and the Azure paved paths that GitHub's next generation of services will be built on, with a focus on safety, reliability, and reducing operational toil.

The Cloud Foundations Team is highly distributed, and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication. You're expected to have strong written communication skills and be able to develop working relationships with coworkers in locations around the globe. As an engineer at GitHub, you'll always be challenged to solve interesting and novel problems that have a real impact on how the world builds software.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical decision making and architecture across the Cloud Foundations surface area, including compute lifecycle, configuration management, infrastructure orchestration, and fleet inventory
• Design and implement scalable, reliable and performant solutions for complex problems such as fleet-wide reboot orchestration, immutable image pipelines, multi-region state management, and service discovery at scale
• Define and build GitHub's Azure paved paths, including event-driven compute, and cloud-native patterns
• Drive the evolution of foundational systems from data center to Azure-native equivalents
• Write, review, and maintain code primarily in Go, and partner with the team on language and tooling choices for new systems
• Mentor other engineers in their technical and architectural decision making, and raise the engineering bar through code review and design feedback
• Participate in on-call rotations for the services and systems owned by the team, leading incident response on hard problems and driving the follow-up work that prevents repeat issues

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• 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 Associate’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ 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 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 Master's Degree 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 Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ 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.

• 4+ years building and supporting large, high traffic applications at scale within platform/infrastructure domains

• 4+ years supporting and building cloud native workloads in Azure, AWS or Google Cloud

• 2+ years experience operating fleet-scale compute infrastructure such as hypervisor platforms, configuration management systems, or orchestration tooling

Preferred Qualifications:

• 6+years experience with Azure, or any other Cloud Provider
• Experience designing or operating paved-path platforms on Azure (Functions, App Service, AKS) or comparable offerings on AWS or GCP
• Experience with Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or comparable configuration management systems at fleet scale
• Experience building or maintaining planetary scale engineering systems
• Experience working with a remote, distributed team

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /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!