Staff Software Engineer, API Gateway Team

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their API Gateway Team. This role involves defining the multi-year technical strategy and owning the system architecture for the API Gateway, ensuring reliability and performance for millions of developers.

Responsibilities:

• Define the multi-year technical strategy and own the system architecture for the API Gateway and traffic management at GitHub, translating long-term vision into executable milestones across multiple teams
• Author and drive architectural decisions (EDRs/ADRs) that become defaults adopted across multiple engineering groups, and lead critical design reviews that resolve disagreements through technical authority
• Lead complex, cross-group reliability and availability efforts — reducing incident volume, improving on-call effectiveness, and designing telemetry that prevents systemic outages before they manifest
• Design and implement scalable, reliable, and performant solutions for complex problems like rate-limiting, routing, and global traffic management at planetary scale; write and review code primarily in Go and Ruby & Rails, setting the bar for engineering excellence
• Establish engineering standards and best practices for traffic management, API design, and AI-assisted engineering patterns that are adopted across multiple groups at GitHub
• Mentor engineers across product lines, act as a primary technical point of contact for leadership, and participate in the on-call rotation

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
• 4+ years building and supporting large, high-traffic applications at scale within platform/infrastructure domains, including cloud native workloads in Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud
• 3+ years demonstrated experience leading cross-team technical initiatives — authoring architectural decision records, driving adoption across multiple engineering groups, and mentoring engineers
• Deep, hands-on experience with HAProxy, Envoy, NGINX, or comparable open source load balancers and proxies at scale
• Experience architecting or operating planetary-scale engineering systems, with a track record of driving multi-year reliability or scalability strategies with measurable, organization-wide impact
• Track record of driving company-wide standards, platforms, or capabilities that change how an engineering organization operates, including leading global incident management strategy and complex cross-team postmortems
• Passionate about fostering excellent API design practices, and experienced establishing AI-assisted engineering patterns that improve velocity and quality across teams
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with experience working in a remote, distributed team, and a track record of authoring technical strategy documents that influence leadership decision
• 2+ years experience maintaining an API Gateway or comparable critical traffic management system in production