Staff 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 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.

Responsibilities: * Design and build core components of GitHub's database platform across our self-managed and cloud-managed infrastructure * Be a subject matter expert on database internals and database administration within GitHub * 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 * 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 * Operate the components our databases run on. Manage kernel tuning, storage configuration, and compute and disk SKU selection to meet throughput, latency, and durability targets * 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 * Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to incidents as needed * Contribute to how our fleet evolves onto Azure

The team is highly distributed across geographies and time zones, and you will thrive in an environm