Principal Software Engineer, Identity

GitHub is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to shape the future of Identity across its platform. Identity is a critical foundation for GitHub's agentic AI ecosystem, enabling secure interactions between users, applications, and AI agents; as AI adoption scales, these systems must support trust, authorization, delegation, and policy enforcement globally. You will lead the architecture of Tier-0 identity services powering authentication and authorization, serving billions of requests daily with the highest standards of security, reliability, and scalability, and partner across Security, Platform, AI, and Product teams to build the identity control plane for GitHub's AI-powered future.

Responsibilities

• Lead and influence design discussions for the overall system architecture of complex products, ensuring security and compliance requirements are met.
• Establish and mentor others in best practices for testing and quality, defining success metrics and producing maintainable code integrated with downstream dependencies.
• Provide technical leadership during code reviews to ensure solutions are reliable and appropriate for the scale of the product feature.
• Partner with stakeholders to determine requirements for services and complex scenarios, incorporating feedback into future designs.
• Act as an expert on debugging tools and methods, leading proactive and reactive work to resolve issues across products and teams.
• Optimize deployments across products, ensuring solutions ship safely and adhere to GitHub's deployment standards.
• Lead product refinement through complex data analytics, integrating data-driven insights into the development process.
• Develop strategies for identifying and mitigating technical risks, establishing frameworks for risk assessment and contingency planning.

Qualifications

• 11+ 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).
• Preferred: experience designing and implementing identity systems such as authentication services, authorization frameworks, and identity federation.
• Preferred: familiarity with identity protocols such as OAuth, OIDC, SAML, and SCIM.
• Preferred: experience with agentic or AI-driven architectures, including systems involving models, agents, or AI APIs.
• Preferred: strong understanding of enterprise security, compliance, and risk management requirements.
• Preferred: experience operating cloud-native systems in environments such as Azure, Kubernetes, or AKS.