Senior Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

GitHub; United States; Remote; USD 124,000 - 329,000; Full time

Job summary

GitHub is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer for its Database Infrastructure team in the United States. You will design and operate the core database platform supporting GitHub’s global user base, with emphasis on reliability, scalability, and cross-region replication.

The role involves on-call rotations, capacity planning, and cloud migrations, particularly to Azure. The ideal candidate has extensive software engineering experience across multiple languages and deep knowledge of MySQL internals,

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering or related technical discipline with production software coding experience in languages such as C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core components of GitHub's database platform across self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure.
• Be a subject matter expert on database internals and administration.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to understand database usage and support through design reviews.
• Operate and improve replication topology, failover automation, and backup/restore tooling.
• Tune kernels, storage, and compute to meet throughput and latency targets.
• Plan capacity, VM/disk generations, and migration strategies.
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response.
• Contribute to migrations to Azure.

Skills

C/C++

C#

Java

JavaScript

Go

Ruby

Rust

Python

Tools

MySQL

Azure

AWS

GCP

Job description

Senior Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

United States

Engineering

Experienced Professional

Individual Contributor

Full Time

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 is looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to join our Database Infrastructure team. We're a team that focuses on ensuring the reliability and scalability of the database fleet that powers GitHub. The Database platform is home to hundreds of terabytes of data, serving over 20 million queries per second on average across our fleet.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core components of GitHub's database platform across our self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure
• Be a subject matter expert on database internals and database administration within GitHub
• Work closely with engineering teams across GitHub to understand how they use our databases, support them through design reviews, and bring their needs back into the team's planning
• Operate and improve replication topology and failover automation including primaries, replica tiers, promotion, cross-region replication, zonal and regional failover, and backup and restore, along with the tooling that makes all of it easy
• Operate the components our databases run on. Manage kernel tuning, storage configuration, and compute and disk SKU selection to meet throughput, latency, and durability targets
• Contribute to capacity planning for the database fleet including instance sizing, reserved capacity strategy, and migrating to new VM and disk generations as they become available
• Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to incidents as needed
• Contribute to how our fleet evolves onto Azure

Qualifications

• 6+ 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 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 fie
• OR equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Excitement about building, operating, and maintaining resilient, scalable systems that impact a global community of users with the ability to break down complex systems into manageable components.
• Strong expertise with MySQL internals: InnoDB, GTID and semi-synchronous replication, replication lag and its root causes, connection pooling and query routing through a proxy tier, read-after-write consistency strategies such as session pinning or GTID-aware routing, and diagnosing performance problems under production load.
• Familiarity with database sharding in production, including shard key selection and cross-shard query costs.
• Strong experience writing production software in Go, Python, Ruby, or Rust, particularly for systems-level work such as agents, daemons, and operational CLI tooling.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure, or equivalent experience on another major cloud provider such as AWS or Google Cloud, and familiarity with managed database offerings.
• Experience contributing to large-scale database infrastructure migrations, including replication-based cutover and correctness verification.

Compensation Range

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