Senior Software Engineer, Client Apps Platform

The Client Apps Platform team is the connective tissue between GitHub's client applications (gh CLI, Desktop, Mobile) and feature-owning backend teams. As a Senior Software Engineer you will build and operate Ruby and Go services, drive architecture and cross-team design, and identify opportunities to extract shared platform capabilities that accelerate client teams. The role offers deep exposure to distributed systems, cross-surface architecture, and influencing technical direction across organizational boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Maintain, extend, and operate production Ruby and Go services powering first-party client apps, writing readable, testable, and maintainable code.
• Lead and facilitate technical design and architecture discussions across product, client app engineers, and domain service teams, documenting architectural tradeoffs.
• Translate client requirements into platform solutions 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 migrations or additional domain bandwidth are required.
• Define testing strategies, success metrics, SLOs, and safe rollout and rollback plans, monitoring telemetry and service health to drive data-informed decisions.
• Serve on-call as first responder, lead incident response and postmortems, and implement long-term reliability 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

• 6+ years of software engineering experience delivering production software in languages such as Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, or Java (less with a relevant degree, or equivalent experience).
• Demonstrated experience in software and system design for scalable, reliable services, plus operating live services with monitoring, debugging, and incident response.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience facilitating cross-team technical discussions.
• Preferred: hands-on production experience with Go and/or Ruby on Rails, familiarity with GraphQL and RPC frameworks such as Twirp.
• Preferred: experience building platforms serving multiple client surfaces (mobile, desktop, CLI), extracting shared libraries from application codebases, and working within large monoliths.
• Preferred: experience defining SLOs, telemetry, and observability tooling.