Principal Software Engineer - GitHub Platform & Enterprise

Overview

GitHub is growing its Engineering team and is hiring across multiple product and platform areas, seeking experienced professionals to elevate our software engineering efforts. As a Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, you will architect and deliver high-performance systems that power collaboration for millions of developers. You will drive technical execution from design through production, leading initiatives across distributed teams.

We have multiple roles open across the following teams, we are hiring for Principal Software Engineers.

GitHub Actions: Within GitHub’s ecosystem, Actions powers automation for millions of developers worldwide, enabling them to build, test, and deploy code directly from their repositories. As the backbone of CI/CD workflows across GitHub, Actions processes billions of jobs monthly, from simple builds to complex deployment pipelines spanning multiple environments. Our team owns the core infrastructure and services that make this possible, ensuring reliability at a massive scale. We're a group of engineers passionate about developer productivity, tackling challenges in distributed systems, container orchestration, security, and cloud infrastructure. You'll work alongside talented colleagues who value collaboration, operational excellence, and building products that developers love.

Enterprise AI Platform: We are looking for Principal Software Engineer's to define and build the foundational systems for GitHub’s Enterprise AI Platform. This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, AI/agent platforms, developer tooling, identity, policy, and platform architecture. You will shape how AI agents operate safely and consistently across IDEs, CLI, MCP, long-running agents, and future Copilot experiences.  This is a highly strategic, high-ambiguity role with broad technical influence across Copilot, platform infrastructure, client experiences, identity, billing, and enterprise products. You will define platform primitives that shape enterprise AI adoption across millions of developers and tens of thousands of organizations across GitHub’s ecosystem.

Enterprise Identity: Identity is a critical foundation for GitHub’s agentic AI ecosystem, enabling secure interactions between users, applications, and AI agents. As AI adoption scales, systems must support trust, authorization, delegation, and policy enforcement at a global scale. In this role, you will lead the architecture of Tier-0 identity services powering authentication and authorization, while shaping the future of agentic identities across the GitHub ecosystem. These systems must operate with the highest standards of security, reliability, and scalability, serving billions of requests daily. You will partner across Security, Platform, AI, and Product teams to define strategy, drive architecture, and build the identity control plane for GitHub’s AI-powered future.

Billing: We are looking for Principal Software Engineer's to own and evolve the metered billing systems that power how millions of developers and organizations pay for GitHub. This role sits at the intersection of billing infrastructure, spend controls, and financial data integrity — full-stack, from backend services to APIs to the customer-facing experience. This is a high-trust, high-consequence role: engineering decisions here carry real financial and compliance impact, and you'll build deep expertise in a domain that's increasingly valuable across the industry. You will drive architectural decisions balancing reliability, scale, and developer velocity, mentor engineers across the team, and partner across GitHub and Microsoft on shared billing and commerce infrastructure problems.

Git Systems: Git Systems Engineering team, which runs the largest code-hosting platform in the world, part of our Platform and Infrastructure organization. Our group is responsible for the services that store and serve Git repositories, both directly to users and to other layers in the GitHub software stack. We build the various microservices, protocols, proxies, and control systems that power Git operations at GitHub and operate them at scale. This role is focused on wide-reaching, cross-team work to improve our git code-hosting platform. This role will be involved in the design, rollout and support of highly performant, highly scalable, and highly available services to enable the next generation of AI-driven software development.

Database Infrastructure : Our team ensures the reliability, performance, and scalability of a fleet comprising hundreds of terabytes of data and serving more than 20 million queries per second. In this role, you will design and operate core database infrastructure across self-managed and cloud-managed environments. You will provide deep expertise in database internals and administration, partner with engineering teams across GitHub, and help guide the continued evolution of our database fleet.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As part of GitHub and CoreAI, we build developer tools that materially improve how software is written, reviewed, and shipped, while maintaining a culture of ownership, rigor, and technical excellence. 

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

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.
• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and partner with stakeholders and lead discussions for technical solutions, including design and cost considerations.
• Lead the team in developing comprehensive testing strategies, defining success metrics, and incorporating customer feedback to drive continuous improvement.
• Champion security across GitHub Actions by designing and implementing isolation mechanisms for untrusted code execution, ensuring compliance with enterprise security requirements, and partnering with Security teams to protect against vulnerabilities in our services.
• Champion operational excellence by improving system reliability, reducing incident response times, and establishing best practices for monitoring, alerting, and runbooks across Actions services.
• Drive and support technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring that engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new technologies and methodologies where applicable.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ year(s) technical leadership experience
• 3+ years' experience using general purpose programming languages (e.g., Go, Ruby, or a similar language)
• 3+ years' experience in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, or a similar language)
• Experience building and operating large-scale services, backend or full-stack, including on call.
• Experience building CI/CD or orchestration systems at scale
• Willingness and ability to participate in a rotating on-call schedule
•  

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.