Senior Software Engineer, Client Apps Platform

GitHub, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 124,000 - 329,000; Full time

Job summary

GitHub is hiring for a role within the Client Apps Platform, building Ruby and Go services and guiding architecture across teams. You’ll drive shared platform capabilities and improve observability while supporting client apps such as gh-CLI, Desktop, and Mobile.

The role emphasizes collaboration, reliability, and leadership in a remote-first environment with strong compensation and growth opportunities.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering experience delivering production software.
• Experience maintaining and delivering production code in multiple languages.
• Ability to design scalable, reliable services and communicate clearly.
• Equivalency of education and experience accepted.

Responsibilities

• Maintain, extend, and operate production Ruby and Go services powering first party client apps.
• Lead and facilitate architectural discussions across product and domain teams.
• Translate client requirements into platform solutions and extract shared components.
• Collaborate to extend or integrate with Rails monolith when needed.
• Define testing strategies, SLOs, and telemetry; monitor service health.
• Attend on-call/incident rotations, drive postmortems, and improve reliability.
• Mentor engineers, participate in reviews, and champion observability.
• Identify cross-team dependencies and ensure security and performance needs.

Skills

Software engineering

Cross-team collaboration

Incident response

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Master's degree in CS or related

Doctorate in CS or related

Associate degree with related experience

Tools

Go

Ruby

Ruby on Rails

GraphQL

Twirp

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.

Locations

In this role you can work from Remote, United States

Overview

You’lljoin the Client Apps Platform team, the connective tissue between GitHub’s client applications (gh-CLI, Desktop, Mobile) andfeature‑owningbackend teams.You’llbuild andoperateRuby and Go services, drivearchitectureandcross teamdesign, andidentifyopportunities to extract shared platform capabilities to accelerate client teams. This role offers deep exposure to distributed systems,cross‑surfacearchitecture, and influencing technical direction across organizational boundaries.

About the Team

The Client Apps Platform team plays a unique role at GitHub. We focus on facilitation, collaboration, and thoughtful system design, helping navigate the creative tension between client experiences and backend capabilities while building shared platform solutions that scale across GitHub.

Responsibilities

• Maintain, extend, andoperateproductionlevelRuby and Goservicespoweringfirst partyclient apps; write readable, testable, and maintainable code integrated with downstream dependencies.
• Lead and facilitate technical design and architecture discussions across product, client app engineers, and domain service teams; propose, validate, and document architectural tradeoffs.
• Translate client requirements into platform solutions; identify and drive extraction of common functionality from apps into shared platform components.
• Collaborate with domain teams to extend or integrate with GitHub’s Ruby on Rails monolith when additional domain bandwidth or migrations are required.
• Define testing strategies, success metrics, SLOs, and safe rollout/rollback plans; monitor telemetry and service health to drive data informed decisions.
• Serve on rotation as on-call/first-responder, lead incident response and postmortems, and implement long‑termreliability improvements.
• Mentor engineers, participate in code reviews, and champion engineering excellence, automation, and observability across the platform.
• Identify cross team dependencies, coordinate workstreams, and resolve conflicts to ensure solutions meet security, performance, and scalability needs.

Qualifications

Required qualifications

• 6+years experiencein Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experiencemaintainingand 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 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ 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 2+ 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.
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 5 years of demonstrated experience in software and system design for scalable, reliable services.
• 5 years of experience facilitating cross-team technical discussions and strong written and verbal communication skills
• 5 years of proven experience maintaining and operating live services, including monitoring, debugging, and incident response.

Preferred qualifications

• Hands‑onexperience with Go and/or Ruby (Ruby on Rails) in production.
• Familiarity with GraphQL and RPC frameworks such as Twirp.
• Experience building platforms or infrastructure that support multiple client surfaces (mobile, desktop, CLI).
• Experience extracting shared libraries/platforms from application codebases and driving adoption.
• Proven ability to work within and extend large existing codebases (e.g., monoliths).
• Experience defining SLOs, telemetry, and observability tooling.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $124,000.00 - USD $329,200.00 /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!