Senior Systems Engineer

Who you are

• 6+ 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 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ 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 2+ 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 fie
• OR equivalent experience
• 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

What the job involves

• GitHub is looking for a Senior 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
• 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

Benefits

• Flexible time away to support balance in your work and life
• Clear diversity, inclusion, and anti-discrimination policies backed by business practices and company culture
• 100% of medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums covered by GitHub for you + your dependents. (Includes gender-affirming benefits)
• Five months of paid family leave to all new parents with the option to use it all at once or throughout the child’s first year
• Family forming benefits that cover fertility, infertility, adoption, and surrogacy costs and support
• Mental health benefits that offer resources and support and cover therapy and coaching sessions for you and your dependents
• Generous 401(k) matching with 50% match up to the IRS 402(g) limit (US; competitive non-US pension options internationally)
• Employee stock purchase plan that lets you purchase Microsoft stock at a discount. (Microsoft is our parent company.)