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, creating self-service infrastructure to empower engineers across the organization.

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 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, 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 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
• 3+ years experience in using monitoring tooling to diagnose performance or availability issues
• 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)