Principal Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

MySQL
UNITED STATES
October 18, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: GitHub
Location: United States
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $160,200 – $425,000

About the Role

GitHub is looking for a Principal Systems Engineer to join its Database Infrastructure team. The team focuses on ensuring the reliability and scalability of the database fleet powering GitHub, serving over 20 million queries per second across hundreds of terabytes of data. In this role, you will define architectural strategy, lead technical direction across self-managed and cloud-managed database infrastructure, and partner with engineering teams across the organization.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Set the technical direction and multi-year architectural strategy for GitHub’s database platform across self-managed and cloud infrastructure.
  • Serve as a subject matter expert on database internals and database administration across GitHub.
  • Partner closely with application, platform, infrastructure, and security teams to align database roadmaps with product requirements.
  • Own replication topology and failover automation, including primary and replica tiers, promotions, cross-region replication, and zonal/regional failover tooling.
  • Manage compute, storage configuration, and kernel tuning to meet throughput, latency, and durability targets.
  • Lead capacity planning for the database fleet, including instance sizing and VM generation migrations.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for critical database systems.
  • Help guide database fleet evolution and architectural migration pathways onto Azure.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 9+ years of professional software engineering or technical discipline experience with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science (or equivalent professional experience).
  • Deep expertise with MySQL internals, including InnoDB, GTID, semi-synchronous replication, connection pooling, and proxy routing tiers.
  • Proven experience with production database sharding, shard key selection, and resharding strategies.
  • Strong software engineering experience in Go, Python, Ruby, or Rust for systems-level agents and operational CLI tooling.
  • Hands-on experience with major cloud providers (Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud) and managed database offerings.
  • Experience leading large-scale database infrastructure migrations, replication cutovers, and rollback planning.

Benefits & Perks

  • Base salary range of $160,200 to $425,000 USD per year, with individual placement based on location and experience.
  • Eligibility for annual performance bonuses and company stock awards.
  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision health coverage.
  • Remote-first working environment with flexible scheduling.
  • Extensive learning and development opportunities.

GitHub is an Equal Opportunity Employer celebrating diversity and committed to creating an inclusive workplace.

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