Staff Software Engineer

The Pathfinders team owns the paved path for how GitHub builds and ships services. We build the tooling, automation, and golden-path templates that let hundreds of services across the company stay secure, up to date, and production-ready without their owners doing the heavy lifting. Our work spans the full software development lifecycle: from scaffolding and standardizing new services, to fleet-wide agentic systems that use AI to automatically detect drift, open fixes, and upgrade services at scale, to infrastructure migrations that keep the platform healthy. We operate primarily in Go, think in terms of leverage over toil, and measure success by how much friction we remove for every other engineer at GitHub. If you like building developer-facing platforms where a single change can improve the daily experience of thousands of engineers, this is the team.

Set the technical direction for the platform that every engineer at GitHub builds on. Our team owns the internal developer platform: the paved paths services adopt to build safely, the cloud and local environments engineers write code in, and the automation and chat-driven tooling that keeps the fleet healthy. We are increasingly putting agents and Copilot to work on the operational grind so humans can spend their time on harder problems. 

In this role you will shape how thousands of engineers do their daily work. The problems here are broad and rarely have a clean answer. You will decide what the paved path should look like and convince the rest of the company to walk it, untangle developer platform and environment systems that have grown gnarly over years, and figure out where agents can safely take over toil and where they cannot yet be trusted. The work spans organizational boundaries, touches nearly every service GitHub runs, and operates at a scale where the pragmatic call usually beats the elegant one. 

We are looking for a staff engineer with a track record of cross-organizational impact: someone who has driven technical change well beyond a single team, can go deep on genuinely hard problems, and raises the bar for engineering craft wherever they work. You will balance hard stakeholder conversations, find the most pragmatic path through ambiguous tradeoffs, and own large architectures end to end. We care about culture as much as reliability, and we believe that how we do things is as important as what we do. Great infrastructure reflects the teams that build it. 

• 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, ambitious architectures that cross team and organizational boundaries, breaking them into pragmatic increments that ship value early 
• Set the standard for engineering excellence across the company 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 a 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 
• Write, review, and maintain production code primarily in Go and Ruby, and stay close enough to the systems to make credible technical calls 
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response, diagnosing and resolving production issues under pressure and feeding what you learn back into the platform 
• Grow the engineers around you through mentorship, pairing, code review, and the example you set for tackling hard problems