Staff Software Engineer

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.
Locations: In this role you can work from Remote, United States
Overview:

GitHub is the home for software development, where developers collaborate to build the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform.

In the GitHub Code Scanning team, we are passionate about making the world’s software - both Open Source and Enterprise - secure and high quality. We believe that the best way to accomplish this is to detect security and quality issues early in the development process, and actively facilitate their remediation as part of the developer workflow.

Our team develops and operates the Code Scanning and Code Quality products that are part of GitHub’s Code Security offering. We use world-class static analysis research and technology to deeply analyze code, enabling the early detection of security vulnerabilities and other bugs that testing and day-to-day use have missed. This role will be involved in the design, rollout and support of highly performant, highly scalable, and highly available services to make found-means-fixed a reality leverage the power of agentic AI.

Responsibilities:

Come join our engineering team and help design, develop, and scale GitHub’s Code Scanning feature. You’ll be working in a full-stack agile engineering team that’s part of the larger Code Scanning group working in Security Products. You’ll work with and learn from Senior and Staff engineers as well as influence team and product direction. In addition, we support and reward spending time on improving diversity, inclusion, and belonging, as well as other important improvement-work outside your core role as a software engineer.

We are looking for creative problem solvers and diverse thinkers, people who care about culture as well as customers and features. We believe that how we do things is as important as what we do. Big vision, a common purpose, passion for quality, curiosity, dedication, and investment in fun and collaboration are what lead to great results. Great products reflect the teams that build them.

We work as a distributed group within a distributed company. The majority of our team members live in Europe and on the east coast of the US and Canada, and while we do have some offices, all our meetings are location-agnostic and happen online. We operate with a high degree of autonomy and trust, and we have a significant level of influence on the product and technical direction of Code Scanning, as well as the broader Security Products at GitHub. We value learning, introspection and reflection, and we’re always looking for ways to improve as a team and as individuals, so candor and a culture that values the safety to speak up are highly important to us.

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services and become intimately familiar with the systems you build and take pride in writing maintainable code.

• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others; support teams in producing extensible and maintainable code, ensuring integration with downstream dependencies and adherence to quality standards.

• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call for first responder rotations and live incidents.

• Write architecture briefs and proposals and carry out code experiments.

• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.

• Utilize CI/CD tools to set up automated pipelines for continuous integration and delivery.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and partner with stakeholders and lead discussions for technical solutions, including design and cost considerations.

• Create and guide others in 1) developing clear testing plans to assure solution quality, reliability, and performance; 2) defining success metrics; and 3) integrating customer feedback for continuous improvement - all while ensuring system architecture meets security and compliance standards.

• Maintain executional and operational excellence within and potentially across teams/organizations.

• Apply debugging tools and telemetry to verify assumptions, proactively resolve issues, and optimize code performance and maintainability.

• Drive and support technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring that engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new technologies and methodologies where applicable.

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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java, 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java, 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java, 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java, 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,
  • OR equivalent experience.

We seek engineers who are passionate about quality, fostering good engineering practices and processes, and mentoring others. In addition, 5+ years of experience in any of the following areas would be considered beneficial:

• Large scale system architecture and design, particularly in cloud-based environments with a strong understanding of systems and microservices

• Building large Ruby on Rail, Go, and React applications and services

• Developing with relational databases, distributed systems and operating software at scale

• Site reliability engineering

• Experience working closely with product management, design, and other engineering teams to drive cross-functional projects

• Experience building end to end applications leveraging agentic AI

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 Leadership Principles:

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!