Principal Systems Engineer, Database Infrastructure

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 looking for a Principal 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. Responsibilities: * Set the technical direction for GitHub's database platform and drive multi-year architectural strategy across our self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure * Be a subject matter expert on database internals, and database administration within GitHub * Partner closely with engineering teams across GitHub including application, platform, infrastructure, and security teams to align database roadmap with product needs, influence design decisions early, and build shared understanding of how our systems are best used. * Own replication topology and failover automation including design for primaries, replica tiers, promotion, cross-region replication, and zonal and regional failover, along with the tooling that makes all of it easy * Own the components our databases run on. Manage kernel tuning, storage configuration, and compute and disk SKU selection to meet throughput, latency, and durability targets * Lead capacity planning for the database fleet including instance sizing, reserved capacity strategy, and migrating to new VM and disk generations as they become available * Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to incidents as needed * Help shape how our fleet evolves onto Azure, and make near