Staff Software Engineer, API Gateway Team

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 changing the way the world builds software, and we want you to help lead this effort.

The API Gateway plays a critical role in GitHub's scalability and resiliency. The API Gateway team is responsible for evolving and operating this critical component and helping elevate standards and best practices for traffic management at GitHub. The team's objective is to ensure that GitHub continues to operate industry-leading services at global scale, and to ensure internal engineering teams have the tools and processes necessary to build on top of our platform with as little friction as possible.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Gateway Team, you will set the technical direction for one of the most critical components of GitHub's platform. You will shape the multi-year architectural vision for traffic management at GitHub, drive cross-team initiatives that span multiple engineering groups, and act as a force multiplier — mentoring engineers while partnering with leadership to translate company priorities into executable technical strategy. Your work will define how millions of developers worldwide experience GitHub's reliability, performance, and developer velocity.

The Gateway team is highly distributed, and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication. You're expected to have exceptional written communication skills — capable of authoring architectural decision records (ADRs), technical strategy documents, and postmortems that influence decisions across the company. As a Staff engineer at GitHub, you'll be trusted with cross-team technical scope, shape architecture others build upon, and tackle the highest-impact problems facing our platform.

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

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.

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

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.

This position will be open for a minimum of 3 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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!