Staff Software Engineer, API Gateway Team

The API Gateway plays a critical role in GitHub's scalability and resiliency. The team evolves and operates this critical component and elevates standards for traffic management across GitHub, ensuring internal engineering teams can build on the platform with as little friction as possible. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Gateway team, you will set the technical direction for one of the most critical components of GitHub's platform, shape the multi-year architectural vision for traffic management, drive cross-team initiatives, and act as a force multiplier, mentoring engineers while translating company priorities into executable technical strategy.

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-year technical strategy and own the system architecture for the API Gateway and traffic management, translating long-term vision into executable milestones across multiple teams.
• Author and drive architectural decision records that become defaults across engineering groups, leading critical design reviews that resolve disagreements through technical authority.
• Lead complex, cross-group reliability and availability efforts: reducing incident volume, improving on-call effectiveness, and designing telemetry that prevents systemic outages.
• Design and implement scalable, performant solutions for problems like rate-limiting, routing, and global traffic management at planetary scale, writing and reviewing code primarily in Go and Ruby on Rails.
• Establish engineering standards for traffic management, API design, and AI-assisted engineering patterns adopted across multiple groups.
• Mentor engineers across product lines, act as a primary technical contact for leadership, and participate in the on-call rotation.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of software engineering experience delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python (less with a relevant degree, or equivalent experience).
• 4+ years building and supporting large, high-traffic applications at scale in platform or infrastructure domains, including cloud-native workloads in Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• 3+ years leading cross-team technical initiatives: authoring architectural decision records, driving adoption across engineering groups, and mentoring engineers.
• Preferred: deep hands-on experience with HAProxy, Envoy, NGINX, or comparable open source load balancers and proxies at scale, ideally including 2+ years maintaining an API gateway or comparable traffic management system in production.
• Preferred: experience architecting planetary-scale systems and driving multi-year reliability or scalability strategies with organization-wide impact.
• Preferred: exceptional written communication, with a track record of technical strategy documents that influence leadership decisions.