Staff Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Staff Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

United States

Engineering

Experienced Professional

Individual Contributor

Yes

5713

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 Staff 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

Design and build core components of GitHub's database platform across our self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure

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

Work closely with engineering teams across GitHub to understand how they use our databases, support them through design reviews, and bring their needs back into the team's planning

Operate and improve replication topology and failover automation including primaries, replica tiers, promotion, cross-region replication, zonal and regional failover, and backup and restore, along with the tooling that makes all of it easy

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

Contribute to 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

Contribute to how our fleet evolves onto Azure

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:

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 Associate’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ 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 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 Master's Degree 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 Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ 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.

Strong 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.

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

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 contributing to large-scale database infrastructure migrations, including replication-based cutover and correctness verification.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /Yr.

• 9+ years software engineering experience or equivalent with proven production coding in languages like C, C++, Java, Go, Python, Ruby, or Rust
• Degree in Computer Science or related field with experience adjusted by degree level (Associate to Doctorate)
• Proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in relevant technical disciplines