Principal Software Engineer, Front End Web UI Platform

GitHub's Core UX organization owns the frontend platform behind GitHub.com: the architecture, tooling, and standards that let hundreds of engineers ship UI that is fast, accessible, consistent, and reliable. This is a systems role, not a single-team role, spanning the concerns that overlap in frontend at scale: performance, accessibility, UX consistency, and availability. Much of the work is evolving a large, actively developed codebase rather than starting from scratch, so success depends as much on migration strategy and cross-team alignment as on architecture. You'll partner closely with other Principal and Staff engineers, Engineering Managers, and Product and Design leadership to decide where the platform goes next.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for GitHub's web UI platform across performance, accessibility, consistency, and availability, balancing long-term architecture with hands-on execution.
• Drive large cross-team initiatives and migrations, sequencing the work so the platform moves forward without disrupting active product development.
• Establish patterns, standards, and paved paths for frontend development that lower cognitive load and scale across many teams.
• Produce architecture and design proposals, evaluate tradeoffs honestly, and build alignment across engineering, product, and design.
• Mentor and raise the bar for engineers at every level through design review, code review, and pairing.
• Represent frontend platform priorities to leadership, securing the support and resourcing needed to deliver.

Qualifications

• 11+ years of experience in software engineering or a related technical discipline delivering production software, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Preferred: deep knowledge of React internals and server-side rendering, with experience modernizing frontend systems in large, multi-team codebases.
• Preferred: track record of improving web performance (Core Web Vitals, interaction latency, bundle size) through systematic, data-driven work.
• Preferred: experience leading cross-team frontend migrations and rollouts, managing sequencing, deprecation, and incremental adoption across many engineers.
• Preferred: strong command of web platform and accessibility fundamentals (browser APIs, a11y standards, TypeScript, CSS) and how they interact with framework-level abstractions.
• Preferred: experience building design systems, shared component libraries, or paved-path tooling that many teams adopt.