Staff Software Engineer, Elasticsearch

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, Canada

Overview

The Elasticsearch team at GitHub owns the infrastructure and code that powers searching Issues, Pull Requests, Projects, Discussions and more. We're responsible for the creation and management of large-scale Elasticsearch clusters (hundreds of terabytes of data serving multiple thousands of reads and writes per second). Our problem space also includes optimizing index creation, population, repair and reindex processes to ensure that indexes with billions or trillions of records are recoverable, correctly mapped, and can be restored quickly. At the same time we're also focused on pushing the boundaries of cluster management, scale and availability.

We're looking for a staff search and data focused engineer to join the team and help us build the future of Search at GitHub. Our top priorities include scaling support for both agentic and human-driven traffic, improving relevance tooling for teams that build search experiences, and building an API-driven interface between our relational data and search indexes.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services and become intimately familiar with the systems you build and take pride in writing maintainable code.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others; support teams in producing extensible and maintainable code, ensuring integration with downstream dependencies and adherence to quality standards.
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call for first responder rotations and live incidents.
• Write architecture briefs and proposals and carry out code experiments.
• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
• Utilize CI/CD tools to set up automated pipelines for continuous integration and delivery.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and partner with stakeholders and lead discussions for technical solutions, including design and cost considerations.
• Create and guide others in 1) developing clear testing plans to assure solution quality, reliability, and performance; 2) defining success metrics; and 3) integrating customer feedback for continuous improvement - all while ensuring system architecture meets security and compliance standards.
• Maintain executional and operational excellence within and potentially across teams/organizations.
• Apply debugging tools and telemetry to verify assumptions, proactively resolve issues, and optimize code performance and maintainability

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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,

• OR equivalent experience.

• 1+ year(s) technical leadership experience

• 6+ years experience of Building, deploying and maintaining Elasticsearch at scale.

• 6+ years experience using general purpose programming languages (e.g., Go, Ruby, or Rust).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, or a similar language), technologies and software platforms, (e.g., Ruby, React, Go, Javascript/typescript, MySQL, cosmosDB, Elasticsearch), front-end frameworks (e.g., React.js), and / or telemetry dashboard (e.g., Datadog, Sentry, Azure Data Explorer)
• Experience with cloud environments and/or Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) concepts.
• 6+ years experience with Lucene/Apache based search engines such as Elasticsearch, Opensearch or Solr.
• 6+ years experience with Search Relevance, Scoring and building Search Experiences and with Infrastructure as code, configuration management and associated tooling such as Terraform, Puppet and Ansible.
• 3 years+ experience in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, or a similar language).

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.

Equal Employment Opportunity

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!