Staff Software Engineer, Traffic Team

GitHub; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

GitHub is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Traffic Team. You will lead architectural decisions to scale and secure GitHub’s edge traffic, designing high-performance load-balancing and routing solutions.

You will work with a distributed, remote-first engineering organization, mentoring peers and solving complex problems that affect millions of developers globally. You will contribute code in Go and Ruby/Rails, improve on-call reliability, and collaborate across time zones to ship robust

Qualifications

• 9+ years of software engineering experience with production systems
• Experience designing scalable, reliable load-balancing solutions
• Proficiency in Go and Ruby/Rails and related tech stack
• Strong written and verbal communication for remote, distributed teams
• Ability to mentor engineers and drive architectural decisions
• Experience in on-call rotation and incident management

Responsibilities

• Lead technical decision making and architecture
• Design and implement scalable, reliable, and performant traffic solutions
• Maintain and improve the GitHub Load Balancer and related systems
• Write and review Go and Ruby/Rails code
• Mentor engineers in technical and architectural decisions
• Participate in on-call rotation and team meetings

Skills

Go

Ruby

System design

Load balancing

Distributed systems

Remote collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

HAProxy

Go tooling

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.

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 Kingdom

Overview

GitHub is changing the way the world builds software, and we want you to help lead this effort. The Traffic Team plays a critical role in GitHub's scalability and resiliency. GitHub’s Traffic team is responsible for every packet into and out of GitHub’s edge and delivers a foundational load balancing platform for all of its services. 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 Traffic Team, you will work closely with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team of engineers to improve and maintain part of the platform that millions of developers worldwide rely on in their software development cycle. The Traffic Team is highly distributed, and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication. You're expected to have strong written communication skills and be able to develop working relationships with coworkers in locations around the globe. As an engineer at GitHub, you'll always be challenged to solve interesting and novel problems that have a real impact on how the world builds software.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical decision making and architecture
• Design and implement scalable, reliable and performant solutions for complex problems like rate-limiting, routing, etc.
• Maintain and improve the GitHub Load Balancer, and other systems related to traffic management at GitHub
• Write, review, and maintain code primary in Go and Ruby & Rails
• Mentor other engineers in their technical and architectural decision making
• Participate in the on-call rotation, and team meetings

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
• 4+ years supporting and building cloud native workloads in Azure, AWS or Google Cloud
• 2+ years experience maintaining a Load Balancer with proven experience in abuse protection mechanisms for DDoS attacks, load shedding, etc.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with HAProxy, or any other open-source Load Balancer
• 2+ Years of Golang experience
• Experience building or maintaining planetary scale engineering systems
• Experience working with a remote, distributed team
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

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.

Equal Employment Opportunity

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!