Staff Software Engineer

The Pathfinders team owns the paved path for how GitHub builds and ships services: the internal developer platform, golden-path templates, cloud and local development environments, and fleet-wide agentic systems that use AI to detect drift, open fixes, and upgrade hundreds of services automatically. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will set technical direction for the platform every engineer at GitHub builds on, decide what the paved path should look like and convince the rest of the company to walk it, and figure out where agents can safely take over operational toil. The team operates primarily in Go, thinks in terms of leverage over toil, and measures success by how much friction it removes for every other engineer.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the team's technical direction across the developer platform, from paved paths and developer environments to operational automation.
• Lead the design and delivery of large architectures that cross team and organizational boundaries, breaking them into pragmatic increments that ship value early.
• Set the standard for engineering excellence through architecture briefs, prototypes, code experiments, and the patterns you put in front of other teams.
• Navigate hard stakeholder conversations, align partners on contentious tradeoffs, and turn competing priorities into clear, defensible technical plans.
• Push agentic and Copilot-driven approaches into operational work, deciding where automation earns trust and where it does not yet belong.
• Untangle developer platform and environment systems that have grown gnarly over years.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of software engineering experience delivering production software.
• A track record of cross-organizational impact: setting technical direction, raising engineering standards, and influencing how other teams build.
• Experience with Go, Ruby, or similar languages in a production infrastructure context.
• Comfort with on-call rotations and incident response in a high-availability environment.
• Preferred: 3+ years working remotely on a distributed engineering team, and interest in applying agentic approaches to operational and reliability work.