Principal Database Infrastructure Engineer (Remote)

GitHub, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 425,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock option program

Annual bonus

Job summary

GitHub is seeking a Principal Systems Engineer to lead the Database Infrastructure team. You will set the technical direction for the database platform, drive multi-year architecture across self-managed and cloud-managed infra, and partner with engineering teams to align roadmap with product needs.

You will own replication topology and capacity planning, and lead migrations to new VM and disk generations. The role requires deep MySQL internals expertise, production-grade Go/Python code

Qualifications

• 11+ years in software engineering or a related field with production software delivery.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for GitHub's database platform and drive multi-year architectural strategy across self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure.
• Be a subject matter expert on database internals and administration within GitHub.
• Partner with engineering teams to align database roadmap with product needs and influence design decisions.
• Own replication topology and failover automation, including primaries, replica tiers, cross-region replication, and zonal failover.
• Manage kernel tuning, storage configuration, and compute/disk SKU choices to meet throughput and durability targets.
• Lead capacity planning and migrations to new VM/disk generations; participate in on-call rotations.

Skills

Database internals

Distributed systems

Go / Python

Cloud experience (Azure/AWS)

On-call/SRE experience

Leadership & mentoring

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science or related

Master's in Computer Science or related

Doctorate in related field

Tools

Azure

MySQL InnoDB

Job description

GitHub is seeking a Principal Systems Engineer to lead the Database Infrastructure team. You will set the technical direction for the database platform, drive multi-year architecture across self-managed and cloud-managed infra, and partner with engineering teams to align roadmap with product needs.

You will own replication topology and capacity planning, and lead migrations to new VM and disk generations. The role requires deep MySQL internals expertise, production-grade Go/Python code