Sr Director, Software Engineering

The Developer Experience (DX) department at GitHub is seeking an experienced Sr. Software Engineering Director to lead the development of foundational components that power GitHub products. This strategic role oversees a group dedicated to ensuring the quality and reliability of service life cycles, with a focus on quality and day-two operations. Key responsibilities include building frameworks and tools that maintain the ongoing quality and operational excellence of GitHub's services. The DX team drives best practices, develops high-performance solutions, and implements safe production operations strategies. This group owns and evolves company-wide observability and monitoring solutions, and delivers critical safety features such as feature flagging and experimentations.

Our mission goes beyond enabling GitHub developers to work efficiently and enjoy their day-to-day activities-we're also committed to ensuring our platforms remain stable, secure, and reliable. This role is critical in a fast-paced environment where you can make a high-impact contribution to our product offerings. As a Sr Software Engineering Director, you'll guide a globally distributed team of managers and engineers, enhancing and scaling our products to deliver an exceptional experience that meets the unique needs of our diverse customer base. A Director leading this team must have a strong balance of people, project, and technical management - flexing their skill sets to empower the team to create innovative solutions and drive long-term positive strategic outcomes for GitHub.

We're looking for a forward-thinking leader who can deliver innovative solutions that advance GitHub's service reliability and developer experience.

We're looking for a forward-thinking leader who can deliver innovative solutions that advance GitHub's service reliability and developer experience.

Responsibilities

A day in the life:

Our team is distributed worldwide which means we work both asynchronously and real-time. Directors at GitHub directly manage managers and engineers and we allow for this track to grow in complexity within the product and technology offerings as well as breadth. We separate this track from our manager roles who manage individual contributors and focus on depth. Your typical week would include:

• Practice thought leadership while building and maintaining a cohesive organizational strategy, driving cross-functional alignment and monitoring execution to ensure strategic objectives are met.
• Collaborating with engineering teams, product management, platform customers, and engineering leadership to align on and understand the problems we want to solve and drive long-term strategic outcomes
• Promote best engineering standards and practices, ensuring teams produce good architectural design outcomes, secure and resilient systems, and quality code.
• Ensuring teams iteratively ship features and bug fixes, balancing speed to market with future velocity.
• Unblocking obstacles for your teams as they solve GitHub's most critical problems, often via real-time conversations in Slack or Zoom and with asynchronous communication in GitHub Issues, PRs, Discussions, and Projects. Help drive clarity and prioritization across the organization.
• Communicating effectively to support internal and external users and inform stakeholders of progress as well as system status and team health
• Hiring and developing talent, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and technical excellence

• 11+ 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 10+ 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 or related field AND 9+ 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 7+ 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 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 equivalent experience.
• 5+ years people management experience.
• 5+ years of experience developing a strategy and roadmap in partnership with your team and stakeholders.
• 5+ years proven experience leading complex, large-scale technical initiatives, with a strong ability to balance deep technical leadership, people management, and cross-functional collaboration to drive execution in fast-moving, high-growth environments., * Experience building and leading diverse, high-performing teams while navigating complex internal ecosystems and influencing senior stakeholders.
• Strong industry presence or internal thought leadership, with a deep interest in tackling scale, reliability, and execution challenges through both vision and operational rigor.
• Experience leading internal teams and managing platforms focused on observability and/or reliability
• Deep understanding of distributed systems performance, including autoscaling, load balancing, and traffic shaping for inference workloads.
• Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high-growth or ambiguous environments.
• Experience collaborating across product, design, and engineering to align technical strategy with business outcomes.

The base salary range for this job is USD $160,200.00 - USD $425,000.00 /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

GitHub is where people build software. More than 150 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.