Senior Systems Engineer – Database Infrastructure

MySQL
UNITED STATES
October 22, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: GitHub
Location: Remote, United States
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $124,000.00 – $329,200.00 / year

About the Role

GitHub is looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to join the Database Infrastructure team. The team focuses on ensuring the reliability and scalability of the database fleet powering GitHub, managing hundreds of terabytes of data and serving over 20 million queries per second on average across the fleet.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Platform Architecture & Engineering: Design and build core components of GitHub’s database platform across self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure.
  • Database Administration & Expertise: Serve as a subject matter expert on database internals and database administration (DBA) within GitHub.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner with engineering teams across GitHub to understand database utilization, support them through architectural design reviews, and incorporate requirements into database roadmaps.
  • Replication & High Availability: Operate and improve replication topology and failover automation, including primary/replica tiers, promotions, cross-region replication, zonal/regional failovers, and backup and restore tooling.
  • Systems & OS Tuning: Manage underlying infrastructure components, including Linux kernel tuning, storage configuration, and compute/disk SKU selection to meet throughput, latency, and durability SLAs.
  • Capacity Planning: Lead database capacity planning, instance sizing, reserved capacity strategies, and hardware/VM generational migrations.
  • Operational Reliability: Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to production incidents and help guide the fleet’s architectural evolution onto Microsoft Azure.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 6+ years of experience in software engineering, systems engineering, computer science, or a related discipline with proven experience building and maintaining production software in languages such as Go, Python, Ruby, Rust, C, C++, C#, or Java (or equivalent combination of relevant degrees and experience: Bachelor’s + 4+ years, Master’s + 2+ years, etc.).
  • Proven hands-on experience supporting and administering large-scale, mission-critical database fleets.
  • Strong distributed systems operational background with ability to thrive in a remote, asynchronous environment.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

  • Deep MySQL Internals Expertise: In-depth knowledge of MySQL, InnoDB, GTID, semi-synchronous replication, diagnosing replication lag, connection pooling, proxy query routing, read-after-write consistency, and production query tuning.
  • Database Sharding: Hands-on experience with production database sharding, including shard key selection and cross-shard query optimization.
  • Systems Software Development: Strong background authoring production systems tooling, daemons, agents, and operational CLIs in Go, Python, Ruby, or Rust.
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Experience running databases on Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, including managed cloud database services.
  • Fleet Migrations: Experience leading large-scale database migrations, replication-based cutovers, and data correctness verifications.

Benefits & Perks

  • Base salary range: $124,000.00 – $329,200.00 / year (dependent on location and experience).
  • Comprehensive benefits package, including eligibility for annual bonuses and company stock.
  • Flexible remote-first work culture and generous learning and professional development opportunities.

GitHub is an equal opportunity employer and embraces diversity in backgrounds and perspectives.

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