Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Database Infrastructure team. The role focuses on ensuring the reliability and scalability of the databases that power GitHub, designing and building core infrastructure, and creating self-service tools for developers.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build a core part of GitHub’s infrastructure, work to scale our database solution
• Be a subject matter expert on MySQL and database administration within GitHub
• Cultivate open source projects developed at GitHub and build things you are proud to share
• Design, develop and maintain tooling for operating database systems and self-service tooling for GitHub developers
• Write technical documentation on how to use internal tooling and best practices for leveraging MySQL
• Escalate risks and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds
• Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to incidents as needed
• Develop and design plans for disaster recovery and systems failovers
• The team is highly distributed across geographies and timezones, and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication

Requirements:

• 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 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ 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 2+ 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
• OR equivalent experience
• 3+ years experience in using monitoring tooling such as Datadog, Sentry, Prometheus, VividCortex, or similar to diagnose performance or availability issues
• 5+ years experience building, deploying and maintaining databases at scale such as MySQL or PostgreSQL in Linux environments
• Excitement about building, operating, and maintaining resilient, scalable systems that impact a global community of users with the ability to break down complex systems into manageable components
• Drive for observability to understand performance and be able to diagnose problems
• Effective communication skills and willingness to pair on problems, brainstorm in public, and enthusiastically engage with your teammates in group problem solving
• Experience writing design docs and getting consensus on technical decisions from a broader group
• Familiarity with database internals and experience with change management (especially database migrations)