Principal Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Principal Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

United States

Engineering

Experienced Professional

Individual Contributor

Yes

5712

Full Time

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Job Description

About GitHub

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development — powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 180 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate, and more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.

Locations

In this role you can work from Remote, United States

Overview

GitHub is looking for a Principal Systems Engineer to join our Database Infrastructure team. We're a team that focuses on ensuring the reliability and scalability of the database fleet that powers GitHub. The Database platform is home to hundreds of terabytes of data, serving over 20 million queries per second on average across our fleet.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for GitHub's database platform and drive multi-year architectural strategy across our self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure

Be a subject matter expert on database internals, and database administration within GitHub

Partner closely with engineering teams across GitHub including application, platform, infrastructure, and security teams to align database roadmap with product needs, influence design decisions early, and build shared understanding of how our systems are best used.

Own replication topology and failover automation including design for primaries, replica tiers, promotion, cross-region replication, and zonal and regional failover, along with the tooling that makes all of it easy

Own the components our databases run on. Manage kernel tuning, storage configuration, and compute and disk SKU selection to meet throughput, latency, and durability targets

Lead capacity planning for the database fleet including instance sizing, reserved capacity strategy, and migrating to new VM and disk generations as they become available

Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to incidents as needed

Help shape how our fleet evolves onto Azure, and make near-term architectural decisions that keep that path open

The team is highly distributed across geographies and time zones, and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

11+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

OR Associate's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 10+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 9+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 7+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.

OR Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 5+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.

OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

Excitement about building, operating, and maintaining resilient, scalable systems that impact a global community of users with the ability to break down complex systems into manageable components.

Deep expertise with MySQL internals: InnoDB, GTID and semi-synchronous replication, replication lag and its root causes, connection pooling and query routing through a proxy tier, read-after-write consistency strategies such as session pinning or GTID-aware routing, and diagnosing performance problems under production load.

Experience with database sharding in production, including shard key selection, cross-shard query costs, and resharding strategy.

Strong experience writing production software in Go, Python, Ruby, or Rust, particularly for systems-level work such as agents, daemons, and operational CLI tooling.

Experience with Microsoft Azure, or equivalent experience on another major cloud provider such as AWS or Google Cloud, and familiarity with managed database offerings.

Experience leading large-scale database infrastructure migrations, including replication-based cutover, correctness verification, and rollback planning. Migrations onto Azure are especially relevant to this role.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $160,200.00 - USD $425,000.00 /Yr.

• 5+ years software engineering experience with a Doctorate, or 7+ years with a Master's, 9+ years with a Bachelor's, 10+ years with an Associate's, or 11+ years without a degree, coding in languages like C, C++, Java, Go, Python, or Rust.
• Proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in relevant programming languages.
• Equivalent experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical disciplines accepted.