Staff Software Engineer, API

Do you want to be part of the team enabling software development teams everywhere to do their best work, with the world’s most elegant, secure, reliable, and powerful developer platform?

The API team plays a crucial role in GitHub’s ecosystem. The GitHub ecosystem is the heart of GitHub and enables developers and communities to grow and thrive on our platform. 

GitHub’s public APIs serve over 3.5 billion API requests per day, and the team’s objective is to ensure that GitHub continues to provide industry-leading APIs at global scale. The team is also focused on ensuring other engineering teams at GitHub have the tools and processes necessary to build on top of our platform with as little friction as possible.

GitHub is changing the way the world builds software and we want you to help lead this effort. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will work closely with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team of engineers and product managers to improve and maintain the APIs that millions of developers depend on in their software development cycle.

The API team is a fully remote team. We expect you to have the ability to communicate complex technical concepts, and be able to create working relationships with coworkers in locations around the globe.

We are looking for creative problem solvers and diverse thinkers - people who care about culture as well as customers and features. We believe that how we do things is as important as what we do. Big vision, a common purpose, passion for quality, curiosity, dedication, and investment in fun and collaboration are what lead to great results. Great platforms reflect the teams that build them.

Responsibilities: 

• Lead technical decision making and architecture
• Architect and implement highly available distributed systems
• Mentor other engineers in their technical and architectural decision making
• Document the systems you help architect, build, and maintain
• Maintain and improve APIs used internally at GitHub and externally by developers
• Write, review, and maintain code primary in Rails and Go
• Coordinate with Product, Design, Support, and other Engineering teams to maintain a backlog of priorities
• Improve the scalability and performance of our platform

Minimum Qualifications: 

• 10+ years building web applications
• 4+ years building large, high traffic web applications at scale
• Experience with web applications in Ruby
• Passionate about fostering good engineering practices and processes
• Solid knowledge of testing principles
• Experience with relational databases
• Experience with API design
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience maintaining a public API over multiple years
• Experience building or maintaining planetary scale engineering systems
• Experience working with a remote, distributed team
• Experience using GraphQL in production environments
• Ability to evaluate the trade-offs for building highly available distributed systems

Who We Are: 

GitHub is the developer company. Over 40 million people use GitHub to build amazing things together across 100 million repositories. We make it easier for developers to be developers: to work together, to solve challenging problems, to create the world’s most important technologies. We foster a collaborative community that can come together—as individuals and in teams—to create the future of software and make a difference in the world.

Our Principles:

• Customer Obsessed 
• Trust by Default
• Ship to Learn
• Own the Outcome
• Growth Mindset
• Global Product, Global Team 
• Anything is Possible 
• Practice Kindness

Why You Should Join:

At GitHub, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hubbers) to do the best work of their lives. We've designed one of the coolest workspaces in San Francisco (HQ), where over half of our Hubbers work, snack, and create daily. The other half of our Hubbers work remotely in 18 countries across the globe.

We are also committed to keeping Hubbers healthy, motivated, focused and creative. We've designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we've built a place where we truly love working, and we think you will too.

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!

*Please note that benefits vary by country, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask your Recruiter!

*Note that this application is for GitHub Engineering and you may have the opportunity to be considered for multiple teams.

Ability to meet GitHub, 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, GitHub’s parent company, Cloud Screen upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

#LI

(Colorado only*) Minimum salary of $62,000 to maximum $240,500 + bonus + equity + benefits.

• Note: Disclosure as required by sb19-085 (8-5-20) of the minimum salary compensation for this role when being hired in Colorado.