Software Engineer: CodeQL C++ Compiler

GitHub is the home for software development, where developers collaborate to build some of the world’s most important software. The security of that software is a collective problem, a responsibility that involves producers and consumers of code, open source maintainers, security researchers, and security teams. At GitHub, we want to give the community the tools it needs to secure the software we all depend on.

CodeQL is one such tool: our semantic code analysis engine that lets you query code as though it were data. CodeQL combines the latest research in compiler optimization with insights in database implementation. It understands the complex data structures inherent in code, and makes analysis available to researchers using a declarative, object-oriented query language.

The CodeQL C/C++ team is looking for a compiler engineer to maintain and improve our state-of-the-art tools that extract information from source code and build processes. For code written in C or C++, we instrument the build process to identify and intercept invocations of the compiler. For every such invocation, we invoke our own compiler-like program that parses the file, resolving macros and includes according to what it gleans from the compiler command line. Header files can be included in multiple compilation units, and symbols in a header can resolve differently each time. The performance budget is tight as each compilation unit can expand to megabytes of source text after preprocessor and template expansion. The balance of producing small databases from large preprocessor-expanded source files is a unique and challenging engineering problem.

Responsibilities:

• Be part of a team of programming language experts working to redefine what’s possible through static analysis and variant analysis.
• Be one of the engineers creating the C/C++ components in our codebase, including C/C++ program analysis and build-system instrumentation tools.
• Ensure that our support for C/C++ language features and tooling is kept up to date with customer usage.
• Keep our build-system instrumentation compatible with the latest operating systems, build systems, and compilers.
• Investigate performance improvements, taking responsibility for design decisions, improving design and maintainability, and adopting a data-driven approach to software improvements.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Understanding of and experience with compiler construction.
• Fluency in programming directly to operating system interfaces: POSIX or the Windows API.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with the compiler for a major language.
• Experience with modern compiler front-ends (e.g. Edison Design Group, GCC, LLVM) 
• In-depth knowledge of the C and C++ languages 

We work as a distributed group within a distributed company. The majority of our team members live in Europe and across the US and Canada, and while we do have some offices, all our meetings are location-agnostic and happen online. We operate with a high degree of autonomy and trust, and we have a significant level of influence on the product and technical direction of CodeQL, as well as the broader code intelligence products at GitHub. We value learning, introspection and reflection, and we’re always looking for ways to improve as a team and as individuals, so candor and a culture that values safety to speak up are highly important to us. 

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We support and reward spending time on improving diversity, inclusion, and belonging, as well as other important improvement-work outside your core role as a software engineer.

Location: In this role, you can work remotely from the following countries: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom or onsite in one of GitHub’s European offices (Amsterdam, Oxford).

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