Staff Engineering Manager, Licensing

GitHub, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 372,000; Full time

Job summary

GitHub is seeking a Staff Engineering Manager to lead the Licensing team, delivering cost-effective, secure technical solutions and aligning architecture with business goals. You will guide this expanded team, set priorities, coach engineers, and ensure the team delivers scalable, compliant usage tracking and downstream billing across core platform and Copilot.

This role focuses on leadership, strategic impact, and collaboration with product and cross-org stakeholders to drive reliable

Qualifications

• 9+ years' experience in software engineering with production systems.
• 3+ years people management experience.

Responsibilities

• Guide teams in creating technical solutions for licensing and subscription access, ensuring cost-effectiveness and security.
• Develop and enforce code review guidelines to ensure reliability and scalability of usage tracking and billing.
• Drive project and release plans in coordination with Product and cross-org stakeholders.
• Oversee deployment optimization across products and components for safe, standard deployments.
• Act as escalation point for live service operations impacting revenue and compliance, offering technical guidance.

Skills

Software engineering

People management

System design

Cloud-native architectures

Go

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

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

GitHub's Licensing team owns the platform experience behind license management and product enablement, determining what products and features customers have access to, managing subscriptions and plan changes, and ensuring usage is tracked and billed accurately. This spans licensing for our core platform and security products as well as enablement for Copilot. It is a role where your work has direct, meaningful impact on GitHub's revenue and customer trust, at a scale spanning millions of developers and organizations.

As a Staff Engineering Manager, you will lead the team in developing cost-effective, secure technical solutions and ensure system architecture aligns with business goals. You'll guide this expanded team through continued growth, driving strategic initiatives and shaping how GitHub's licensing and enablement offerings evolve. You will create the conditions for a high-performing team to do its best work: setting clear priorities, building strong partnerships, coaching engineers toward their next level of growth, and ensuring the team delivers outcomes that are technically sound, scalable, and aligned with GitHub's business needs.

Responsibilities

• Guide teams in creating technical solutions for licensing and subscription access, ensuring designs are cost-effective and meet security and compliance requirements.
• Develop and enforce code review guidelines that adhere to GitHub's quality standards, ensuring reliability, accuracy, and scalability of usage tracking and downstream billing.
• Drive project plans, release plans, and work items in coordination with Product and cross-org stakeholders to ensure resources are allocated effectively.
• Guide efforts to optimize deployments across products and components, ensuring solutions are deployed safely and adhere to GitHub's deployment standards.
• Act as an escalation point for live service operations on systems with direct revenue and compliance impact, providing technical guidance to resolve complex incidents.
• Oversee the development and reuse of software developer tools to support code creation, debugging, and maintenance.
• Lead and manage team performance, driving employee development and ensuring the team's skills remain current with industry developments.
• Serve as a technical and organizational leader beyond your immediate team, influencing architecture and practices across the broader organization.
• Lead initiatives to enhance quality assurance processes, ensuring products meet the highest standards of quality and reliability before release.
• Hire, coach, and retain top engineering talent, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 9+ years' experience in software engineering, computer science, or a 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, 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 the languages above,
  • 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 the languages above,
  • OR master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, 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 the languages above,
  • OR doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, 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 the languages above,
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years people management experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong system design and architecture skills, with experience in resilient system design, technology selection, and cloud-native, event-driven distributed systems (e.g., Azure or similar cloud platforms, event streaming/pub-sub, async job processing); direct experience with Azure, Cosmos DB, or Go is a plus but not required.
• Experience leading large, diverse engineering teams in a fast-paced environment, with a track record of successfully delivering complex projects on time and within budget.
• Experience developing customer-facing product experiences, with a strong understanding of UX principles and the ability to incorporate customer feedback into full-stack product development.
• Experience with billing, metering, licensing, or other systems with direct financial/compliance impact.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /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!