Staff Software Engineer

Title: Staff Software Engineer

Location: Remote, United States

Job Description:

About GitHub

GitHub is the world's leading platform for agentic software development - powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 180 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate, and more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.

In this role you can work  Remote, United States

Overview

GitHub's GraphQL Platform Team builds and operates the core GraphQL infrastructure that powers GitHub's public and internal APIs, serving more than 2 billion queries per day. The team enables scalable, reliable, and high‑quality API access for millions of developers and GitHub product teams. A major focus of the work is implementing and scaling GraphQL Federation, supporting a distributed services architecture that allows teams across GitHub to independently contribute to a unified schema.

As a Staff Platform Engineer on the GraphQL Platform Team, you'll be a technical leader helping shape the foundation of GitHub's GraphQL ecosystem. This is deep platform engineering work - you won't be building product features or individual GraphQL services. Instead, you'll design, build, and evolve the infrastructure that enables GraphQL development across the company.

You'll collaborate closely with engineers and engineering leadership to drive the architecture and long‑term technical direction of GitHub's federated GraphQL platform. Your work will range from solving complex performance and scalability challenges to defining multi‑quarter architectural strategy. You'll influence teams across GitHub, mentor other engineers, and help raise the technical bar for the platform as a whole.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in large‑scope, high‑impact problem spaces and enjoys balancing hands‑on technical depth with broad architectural ownership.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of GitHub's federated GraphQL platform at global scale.

• Drive the technical roadmap for GraphQL Federation adoption in collaboration with partner teams.

• Design and build core federation infrastructure, including gateways, schema composition, and query planning.

• Solve complex, cross‑team technical challenges that span multiple systems and services.

• Develop shared GraphQL tooling, libraries, and abstractions that lower friction for engineering teams.

• Set and uphold high standards for schema design, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.

• Monitor platform health and proactively address reliability, scalability, and performance risks.

• Mentor engineers and influence technical excellence across GitHub.

• Communicate technical strategy and trade‑offs clearly to engineering leadership.

• Participate in on‑call rotations to ensure platform availability and health.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building and operating high‑scale web or platform systems.

• Deep experience designing, building, and scaling GraphQL APIs, including federation.

• Hands‑on experience with GraphQL Federation infrastructure (routers, schema composition, gateways).

• Strong background in performance optimization, monitoring, and reliability at scale.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, containerization, and CI/CD automation.

• Proficiency in Go and/or Ruby, with experience setting technical standards across teams.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /Yr.

These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role.

GitHub values

• Customer-obsessed
• Ship to learn
• Growth mindset
• Own the outcome
• Better together
• Diverse and inclusive

Manager fundamentals

• Model
• Coach
• Care

Leadership principles

• Create clarity
• Generate energy
• Deliver success

Who We Are

GitHub is the world's leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 million developers and counting. We're also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world's software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.

Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We're remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are-because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.

Join us, and let's change the world, together.

EEO Statement

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!