Staff Software Engineer, Billing

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's Billing team builds and maintains the systems behind how millions of developers and organizations pay for GitHub. This includes payment processing, billing infrastructure, abuse detection, and compliance.

As part of a platform that supports everything from individual developers to Fortune 500 enterprises, you'll work on systems that detect and prevent fraud and abuse at scale, protecting GitHub's revenue and the integrity of the platform. It's a space where engineering decisions carry real financial and trust & safety consequences, and where you'll build deep expertise in a domain that's increasingly critical across the industry.

We're a remote-first, distributed team looking for a seasoned engineer with experience building solutions in or alongside fraud, abuse, or platform health domains, and the technical judgment to lead high-stakes detection and mitigation work. You'll primarily focus on fraud and abuse mitigation, while flexing into our broader payment and metered billing systems as needed — so curiosity about adjacent domains matters as much as depth in your own.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve billing and payment systems that serve millions of GitHub users, with a focus on fraud and abuse mitigation, driving architectural decisions that balance reliability, scale, and developer velocity.
• Work across the stack, from backend services to APIs to frontend experiences.
• 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.
• Mentor and grow engineers across the team and broader org through pairing, thoughtful feedback, leading by example, and contributing to engineering-wide practices.
• Use AI-assisted development tools like GitHub Copilot to work effectively and help the team figure out where they're most useful.
• Collaborate with and influence cross-functional teams and partner with stakeholders and lead discussions across GitHub and Microsoft on shared technical problems, including design and cross-cutting concerns.
• Participate in on-call rotations, lead incident response, and drive reliability improvements based on operational learnings.
• 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.

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.

• Demonstrated experience designing and operating services on cloud platforms such as Azure, including infrastructure and deployment concerns.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience integrating with payment processors or marketplace billing platforms (e.g., Stripe, Zuora, Azure Marketplace), with an understanding of how to design invoicing flows that balance pre-payment, billing in arrears, incremental payments, and authorization checks.
• Familiarity with fraud and risk tooling — such as Stripe Radar, risk scoring, and trust/reputation tiers and with bot or identity abuse prevention (e.g., DataDome, Arkose, Persona, CAPTCHA) to reduce account abuse, chargebacks, and non-payment risk.
• Hands-on experience building and operating Go services at scale in high-traffic production environments.
• Experience with JavaScript and frontend frameworks like React.
• Track record of driving technical decisions across teams through RFCs, design docs, and async collaboration in a distributed environment.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the quality bar through code review, pairing, and technical leadership.

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!