GitHub is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Developer Experience (DX) team and help shape the future of our Engineering organization. In this critical leadership position, you’ll drive system architecture, inspire and coach engineering teams, and deliver innovative solutions that make a real impact.
We’re looking for someone with deep expertise in building and tuning scalable, high-performance systems, someone who thrives on optimizing high-throughput services at scale. You have a proven track record of solving complex technical challenges with creativity and pragmatism, and you excel in highly collaborative, cross-functional environments.
In DX, our mission is to empower GitHub developers to do their best work while ensuring our platforms are stable, secure, and reliable in an ever-evolving ecosystem. As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll work alongside a globally distributed team of talented engineers and managers to enhance and scale our products, delivering an exceptional experience to our diverse and growing customer base.
You’ll lead by example—both through your own technical contributions and by mentoring others. You’ll guide technical strategy, influence architectural decisions, and drive performance optimization across teams. Our culture is built on developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration. Here, curiosity and a drive for impact are at the heart of everything we do.
Responsibilities
Join us to help shape the future of software development and make a difference for millions of developers around the world.
Lead and influence system architecture design for complex products and solutions, ensuring they meet security, compliance, and performance requirements.
Establish and mentor best practices for testing, performance tuning, and code quality, defining success metrics and ensuring maintainability across dependencies.
Provide technical leadership during code reviews to ensure reliability, scalability, and alignment with product goals.
Partner with product managers and technical leads to define service requirements and incorporate feedback into future designs.
Act as an expert in debugging tools and methods, leading proactive and reactive development to resolve issues across teams.
Optimize deployments and runtime performance to meet business objectives, ensuring safe rollouts aligned with GitHub’s standards.
Drive improvements in development quality and team performance through tooling, automation, and knowledge sharing.
Lead product refinement through telemetry analysis, performance metrics, and experimentation frameworks to inform engineering decisions.
Develop strategies to identify and mitigate technical risks, including frameworks for risk assessment and contingency planning.
Shape the strategic vision for technology and product development, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives aligned with GitHub’s long-term goals.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
11+ years’ experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline
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
Experience building and operating production CI/CD or release pipelines for complex distributed systems.
Enterprise experience contributing technical solutions to high throughput services in production environments, such as systems profiling tools and distributed systems performance tuning.
Experience with Linux-based systems, containers, and software packaging or artifact delivery.
Experience troubleshooting build, test, and release failures across multiple layers of the stack.
Proven ability to improve engineering systems through automation, observability, and process simplification.
Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, or related field.
Preferred Qualifications:
Proven experience designing and operating high-throughput cloud-native distributed systems in production environments.
Deep understanding of performance profiling, observability, and telemetry-driven optimization, especially in Go or similar languages.
Experience driving cross-functional projects in close partnership with product management, design, and engineering teams.
Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture.
#GithubIndia
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
Skills Required
- 11+ years experience in Software Engineering or related technical discipline
- Proven experience delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
- Experience building and operating production CI/CD or release pipelines for complex distributed systems
- Enterprise experience contributing technical solutions to high-throughput production services, including profiling and performance tuning
- Experience with Linux-based systems, containers, and software packaging or artifact delivery
- Experience troubleshooting build, test, and release failures across multiple layers of the stack
- Proven ability to improve engineering systems through automation, observability, and process simplification
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, or related field
- Experience designing and operating cloud-native distributed systems in production (preferred)
- Deep understanding of performance profiling, observability, and telemetry-driven optimization, especially in Go or similar languages (preferred)
- Experience driving cross-functional projects and mentoring senior engineers (preferred)
Microsoft Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Microsoft and has not been reviewed or approved by Microsoft.
-
Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is presented as broadly competitive overall, with clear role/level/location variation and an emphasis on using posted ranges and band information for apples-to-apples comparisons.
-
Retirement Support — Retirement benefits are described as a standout, highlighted by a strong 401(k) match structure and immediate vesting, plus additional plan features for tax-advantaged saving.
-
Parental & Family Support — Family-oriented benefits are portrayed as a meaningful strength, with substantial paid parental leave and added supports like back-up care and adoption/surrogacy assistance.
Microsoft Insights
What We Do
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our mission is grounded in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world.
.png){kind=logo}
