Principal Software Engineer, Github
$134.8-357.5k
AI-powered developer platform to build, scale & deliver secure software
Job no longer available
AI-powered developer platform to build, scale & deliver secure software
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$134.8-357.5k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help every developer—regardless of experience level—learn, code, and ship software effectively.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- 10+ years of professional experience in frontend development, with a strong proficiency in modern JavaScript frameworks (especially React) and with the last 4 years in a senior technical role (e.g. Staff / Principal or equivalent)
- 7+ years of experience in designing, building, and maintaining large-scale frontend applications and the backend systems that support these with an emphasis on performance, scalability, and maintainability
- 7+ years of providing technical leadership and mentorship, guiding teams to deliver high-quality software solutions, demonstrating a proactive bias for action in ensuring timely execution of projects and initiatives
- 3+ years of experience constructing APIs for front-end applications OR proficiency consuming those APIs while leveraging associated client libraries like Apollo, TRPC, Relay, etc
Desirable
- Experience navigating how different concerns within the frontend engineering space overlap (e.g. accessibility, performance, UX consistency) and crafting execution strategies that successfully take these areas into consideration and lead to meaningful and impactful deliverables
- Deep expertise and knowledge of the inner workings of React and related technologies
- Passionate and active in the evolution of current front-end architecture trends and best practices, encompassing performance, accessibility, security, and usability
- Extensive experience with TypeScript and other statically typed languages, Node.js, the Web platform, and UI architecture
- Experience with large-scale codebases with contributors that span teams, offices and time zones
- Prior experience with Ruby on Rails or other backend technologies
- Proficiency in using and customizing build tools and automation frameworks, such as Webpack
- Prior experience articulating complex technical concepts to both technical (engineers at all levels) and non-technical (stakeholders and executives) audiences
What the job involves
- GitHub is revolutionizing the way developers collaborate and build software, and we are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to pioneer the UI Platform space, which entails areas of frontend performance, accessibility, consistency, and availability
- This role is pivotal to defining GitHub's future UI architecture, ensuring accessibility for all users, delivering an exceptional user interface, enhancing developer experience, and positioning GitHub as a leader in UI innovation, thereby empowering millions of developers worldwide
- Lead the architectural design and development of GitHub's web UI platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, accessibility, and performance
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and prioritize projects aimed at enhancing GitHub's user experience
- Establish best practices, patterns, and guidelines for frontend development, fostering a culture of excellence and innovation
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to frontend engineering teams, promoting continuous learning and growth
- Drive initiatives to improve engineering processes, tooling, and automation to streamline development workflows
- Champion accessibility, performance, and usability standards, ensuring that GitHub's web interfaces are accessible to all users and optimized for performance
- Stay abreast of emerging frontend technologies, trends, and best practices, advocating for their adoption when beneficial to GitHub's development ecosystem
- Collaborate with product management and design teams to translate user needs and business requirements into technical solutions
- Serve as a subject matter expert on web UI development, representing GitHub in industry conferences, forums, and technical communities
- A week in the life of a Principal Engineer might consist of:
- Collaborating with other Principal Engineers to define the future of GitHub engineering and working together to implement that vision
- Collaborating with design, analytics, support, and product management to understand the problems we want to solve and exploring how we can solve them
- Digging into the most important issues the department is tackling by asking questions, creating plans, recognizing pitfalls, raising concerns, and creating clarity
- Discussing and collaboratively solving engineering and product problems with engineering collaborators in Slack or Zoom
- Planning and executing large-scale company-wide rollouts and migrations
- Supporting company-wide initiatives
- Bringing key plans and execution ideas to the management team
- Mentoring other engineers at all experience levels
- Providing comprehensive and high quality code or design reviews when requested by other teams at GitHub
- Reviewing teammates' Pull Requests and providing helpful feedback
- Serve as an engineering representative for critical customer conversations to discover what they love and what their pain points are
- Embedding in a squad periodically to enable others to tackle challenges and stretch assignments
- As a part of Engineering technical leadership, advising on key initiatives, gaps, and technical pitfalls we need to be aware of
Our take
GitHub was founded to make a developer’s job easier with open and asynchronous communication, distributed version control, and source code management with Git. In the first year alone, 100,000 users were pushing code on the site.
GitHub has quickly become the world’s most popular platform for developers to collaborate on open-source projects from anywhere. Nearly every major company including Facebook, Google, and Apple hosts open-source projects on GitHub.
Github's work culture reflects its global community, with employees collaborating remotely from all over the world. In 2018, Microsoft acquired the company as part of its broader strategy to enhance cloud computing services. Since then, GitHub has been dedicated to evolving its platform, consistently investing in ongoing development to better serve its users.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
18% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Jul 2015
$250m
SERIES B
Jul 2012
$100m
SERIES A
Total funding: $350m
Company benefits
- Flexible time away to support balance in your work and life
- Clear diversity, inclusion, and anti-discrimination policies backed by business practices and company culture
- Five months of paid family leave to all new parents with the option to use it all at once or throughout the child’s first year
- Family forming benefits that cover fertility, infertility, adoption, and surrogacy costs and support
- Mental health benefits that offer resources and support and cover therapy and coaching sessions for you and your dependents
- Generous 401(k) matching with 50% match up to the IRS 402(g) limit (US; competitive non-US pension options internationally)
- Employee stock purchase plan that lets you purchase Microsoft stock at a discount. (Microsoft is our parent company.)
- 100% of medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums covered by GitHub for you + your dependents. (Includes gender-affirming benefits)
Company HQ
South Beach, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Kyle Daigle
(COO)Prior to GitHub, Kyle took on developer-focused challenges as an engineering and product leader in startups, working in FinTech, real estate, and consulting.
Vladimir Fedorov
(CTO)Before joining GitHub, Vlad co-founded UserClouds, a startup specializing in data governance and privacy. He spent 12 years at Facebook as SVP, leading engineering teams across Privacy, Ads, and Platform.
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