Staff Software Engineer, API Gateway Team

GitHub, Inc.•UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

4d•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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