Staff Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

MySQL
UNITED STATES
October 20, 2026
Full Time
Apply Now

Job Description

Company: GitHub
Location: United States
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: USD $140,400.00 – USD $372,300.00 /Yr

About the Role

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.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Platform Architecture: Design and build core components of GitHub’s database platform across our self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure.
  • Subject Matter Expertise: Be a subject matter expert on database internals and database administration within GitHub.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration: 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.
  • Replication & Availability: 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.
  • Infrastructure Tuning: Manage kernel tuning, storage configuration, and compute and disk SKU selection to meet throughput, latency, and durability targets.
  • Capacity Planning: 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.
  • Incident Response: Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to incidents as needed.
  • Cloud Migration: Contribute to how our fleet evolves onto Azure.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • Engineering Experience: 3 to 9+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline (depending on highest completed degree level) 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.
  • Operational Scale: Demonstrated experience maintaining and delivering production software systems at a global scale.
  • Remote Collaboration: Ability to thrive in a highly distributed team across geographies and time zones with remote work and asynchronous communication.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • MySQL Internals: 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.
  • Database Sharding: Familiarity with database sharding in production, including shard key selection and cross-shard query costs.
  • Systems Development: Strong experience writing production software in Go, Python, Ruby, or Rust, particularly for systems-level work such as agents, daemons, and operational CLI tooling.
  • Cloud Platforms: Experience with Microsoft Azure, or equivalent experience on another major cloud provider such as AWS or Google Cloud, and familiarity with managed database offerings.
  • Infrastructure Migrations: Experience contributing to large-scale database infrastructure migrations, including replication-based cutover and correctness verification.

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

  • Competitive pay and base salary range based on location and experience.
  • Eligibility for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock.
  • Generous learning and growth opportunities.
  • Remote-first work culture designed to support you wherever you are.

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.

Related Jobs