Software Engineer III

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 changing the way the world builds software and we want you to help lead this effort.

The Compute Foundation team owns and operates the core runtime layers that powers GitHub’s internal compute platform. Our team is responsible for the hypervisor-based GC2 VM platform, OS and container base images, fleet-wide configuration management, and secure, automated reboot orchestration across GitHub’s global data centers. Our mission is to provide a reliable, scalable, and low-toil platform that enables internal engineering teams to ship features, migrate to Azure, and meet security SLAs without worrying about infrastructure complexity.

As a Software Engineer III, you will contribute to the engineering foundations that keep GitHub’s services running smoothly. You’ll collaborate with a distributed team of engineers to improve the reliability, safety, and automation of our compute platform, covering everything from hypervisor lifecycle and VM runtime workflows to image pipelines and configuration tooling.

You’ll work in an environment optimized for asynchronous work and written communication, partnering with teams across the company to help them adopt platform best practices and build resilient services on top of our infrastructure. You’ll have opportunities to take well-scoped ownership areas, implement improvements that reduce operational toil, and build systems that directly support GitHub’s ability to scale.

This role provides the opportunity to solve complex infrastructure problems at scale, strengthen the platform that hundreds of internal teams rely on, and help shape the future of GitHub’s compute ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design and implementation of reliable, performant, and secure systems that support GitHub’s compute platform (e.g. hypervisor, lifecycle, VM runtime, automation, image pipelines, and configuration tooling)
• Build features and automation that reduce operational toil and increase the predictability and safety of platform operations.
• Maintain and improve existing compute and lifecycle services, including GC2 components, fleet management workflows, and base OS/container image pipelines.
• Write, review, and maintain high-quality code while following GitHub engineering best practices.
• Collaborate with partner engineering teams to help them adopt platform capabilities, debug issues, and integrate with Platform APIs and workflows.
• Participate in on-call rotations for the services and systems owned by the organization, contributing to incident response, reliability improvements, and follow-up work.
• Contribute to clear, thoughtful documentation and to asynchronous communication patterns that support a distributed engineering environment.

Qualifications Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• 4+ years’ technical experience in infrastructure domains (e.g., container orchestration engineering, platform engineering, database engineering, software engineering, network engineering, systems administration, or related field),

• OR bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years’ technical experience in infrastructure domains (e.g., container orchestration engineering, platform engineering, database engineering, software engineering, network engineering, systems administration, or related field),
• OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years building and supporting large, high traffic applications at scale within platform/infrastructure domains
• 2+ years supporting and building cloud native workloads in Azure, AWS or Google Cloud

Preferred Qualifications:

• 4+ years’ experience with Azure, or any other Cloud Provider
• Experience building or maintaining planetary scale engineering systems
• Experience working with a remote, distributed team
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Demonstrated expertise in working with cloud environments and Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) concepts, which is beneficial for managing and optimizing cloud-based infrastructure.

Compensation Range The base salary range for this job is USD $107,700.00 - USD $285,900.00 /Yr.

These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role.

GitHub values

• Customer-obsessed
• Ship to learn
• Growth mindset
• Own the outcome
• Better together
• Diverse and inclusive

Manager fundamentals

• Model
• Coach
• Care

Leadership principles

• Create clarity
• Generate energy
• Deliver success

Who We Are GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 million developers and counting. We’re also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world’s software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.

Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We’re remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.

Join us, and let’s change the world, together.

EEO Statement GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!