Staff Software Engineer | GitHub | Remote United States
Job Description
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
The GitHub Security Products team is on a mission to secure the world’s software. We’re building tools that make it easy to find, fix and prevent code vulnerabilities and credential leaks, and are deploying them to millions of developers. Every day, developers unintentionally commit secrets into their repositories. Without intervention, this can cause damaging privacy and monetary losses. We’re solving that.
We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of foundational components and help drive the 10x evolution of this product in the near future as we continue to find new ways to secure the emerging AI powered workloads on the platform. This role is critical in a fast-paced environment where you can make a high-impact contribution.
You will contribute through strong technical implementation, thoughtful design decisions, and collaboration across teams. You’ll help uphold architectural standards, reinforce best practices for system performance, and identify opportunities to improve reliability and scale. Your contributions will directly shape the stability and growth of core infrastructure that backs supporting security product infrastructures. We value developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration. At GitHub, curiosity and impact drive everything we build.
Responsibilities
Our team is distributed worldwide which means we work both asynchronously and real-time.
Your typical week would include:
Lead and influence system architecture design for complex products and solutions, ensuring they meet security, compliance, and performance requirements.
Establish and mentor best practices for testing, performance tuning, and code quality, defining success metrics and ensuring maintainability across dependencies.
Provide technical leadership during code reviews to ensure reliability, scalability, and alignment with product goals.
Partner with product managers and technical leads to define service requirements and incorporate feedback into future designs.
Act as an expert in debugging tools and methods, leading proactive and reactive development to resolve issues across teams.
Optimize deployments and runtime performance to meet business objectives, ensuring safe rollouts aligned with GitHub’s standards.
Drive improvements in development quality and team performance through tooling, automation, and knowledge sharing.
Lead product refinement through telemetry analysis, performance metrics, and experimentation frameworks to inform engineering decisions.
Develop strategies to identify and mitigate technical risks, including frameworks for risk assessment and contingency planning.
Shape the strategic vision for technology and product development, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives aligned with GitHub’s long-term goals.
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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, and 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
Experience developing and/or integrating machine learning or generative AI capabilities into production systems.
Experience developing security tools for developer platforms.
Demonstrated experience with large-scale system architecture and design, particularly in cloud-based environments, with a strong understanding of distributed systems and microservices.
Experience driving cross-functional projects in close partnership with product management, design, and engineering teams.
Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture.
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.
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!
