Staff Software Engineer, Pull Request Platform

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's Pull Request Platform powers one of the most critical developer workflows in the world. Every pull request operation across GitHub.com, the API, and GitHub Enterprise Server depends on the systems this team owns. The team is responsible for pull request state, mergeability, indexing, automation, and platform reliability, serving tens of millions of developers who collaborate, review code, and ship software every day.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help lead Pull Request Platform through a period of significant technical investment. The team is strengthening production reliability in a complex, high-traffic area, contributing to GitHub's service-extraction efforts, and evolving its infrastructure to meet growing scale requirements. You'll join our Core Productivity organization and directly influence the reliability and performance of one of GitHub's most visible and heavily used features.

As a staff engineer, you'll be a hands-on technical leader who shapes architecture, guides complex initiatives, and helps the team turn ambiguous problems into durable solutions. You'll work across Git operations, databases, search, APIs, and asynchronous workflows while helping define the platform's longer-term technical direction.

This work blends distributed systems experience with pragmatic execution — moving between writing and reviewing code, leading architectural decisions, improving production systems, and building alignment across organizational boundaries. You'll partner closely with Pull Request Experience, Repositories Platform, Git Systems, and other teams across GitHub while mentoring engineers and helping the team grow its technical practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, implementation, and evolution of systems that power pull requests at GitHub scale.
• Help define and execute the Pull Request Platform technical roadmap, aligning engineering investments with GitHub’s reliability, scalability, and service-extraction priorities.
• Solve complex technical challenges spanning Git operations, databases, search and indexing, APIs, and asynchronous workflows.
• Design, develop, test, and ship maintainable solutions that operate across multiple GitHub services.
• Own and advocate for the health of the team’s production systems, including participating in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident improvements.
• Set high standards for operational safety, testing, observability, deployment practices, and production rollouts.
• Write architecture briefs and technical proposals, conduct code experiments, and clearly communicate tradeoffs and operational risks.
• Partner across engineering teams to define scalable interfaces, reduce system friction, and lead initiatives such as service extraction and platform hardening.
• Provide technical leadership through mentorship, pairing, code and design reviews, and guidance that helps other engineers deliver extensible, maintainable systems.
• Improve engineering and operational excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across testing, deployment, and operations.

Qualifications

Minimum 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

Preferred Qualifications:

• 1+ years' experience developing software in Ruby and/or Go.
• 1+ years’ experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or platform infrastructure with demanding reliability and performance requirements.
• 1+ years’ experience diagnosing and improving the scalability, observability, resilience, and performance of high-traffic production systems.
• Experience with monolith decomposition, service extraction, or other large-scale architecture migrations.

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!