GitHub is changing the way the world builds software, and we want you to help build GitHub! We are looking for a world-class senior software engineer to join the Special Projects team at GitHub. 

On this team, we work on a wide variety of customer-facing projects with a high degree of autonomy and at a high tempo. In the past several months, we’ve worked on projects to remove customer friction points across GitHub.com, to improve the experience of Enterprise customers by partnering with teams across GitHub, and on various special projects to highlight the power of open source around the work, like the Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge in partnership with NASA.

The Special Projects team is distributed across the US, Canada and Europe, and we are looking for engineers that have a variety of experience across front-end and backend, enjoy working in an environment that thrives with creativity, judgement, and a process that values tempo and time-boxed efforts. You’ll work across a wide spectrum of the GitHub product and every week will be slightly different than the week before.

We care deeply about an environment where everyone on the team has an equal voice, empowered to do their best work, focus on direct customer impact and collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers across the company.

A Day in the Life

Our team is distributed and works asynchronously much of the time. We meet as a group once a week and provide plenty of focused time to dive into your work and utilize Slack and Zoom to collaborate and communicate. In a given week you will:

• Take on a task that you’ll own to completion with our partners in Product and Design. You’ll work to understand the problem with Product, build a solution along with Design, and work to ship a pragmatic, joyous solution.
• Review other team members’ Pull Requests and provide helpful feedback, pair on their solution, and share your expertise.
• Share your experiences and opinions in our weekly meeting where we celebrate successes and strive to remove friction and roadblocks from our process.
• Work with your engineering manager in your one-on-one meetings to help grow your career.
• Identify friction within GitHub that you experience or on behalf of our users and add it to our board to prioritize.

Responsibilities:

• Find creative solutions to customer problems and, in many cases, on your own to scope out and build a technical solution which can span across GitHub’s services.
• Listen to diverse perspectives and work with others to move forward to ship secure, maintainable, and consistent features.
• Read, write, and review code primarily in Ruby, Javascript (Typescript), and at times Go, C, or .NET
• Provide leadership for all tasks you take on and to support your team on their tasks providing mentorship, technical leadership, and growth support.
• Have a resourceful, driven attitude when taking on tasks while balancing pragmatic solutions against our team’s time box.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience working technical projects, making trade offs, towards broader company/project goals.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails in production web applications. The vast majority of our work is completed in Ruby on Rails across many different sections of the GitHub monolith.
• You have excellent analytical and communication skills, be it when you write code, emails, or explain complex technical issues to non-technical co-workers. We’re a distributed team that often works asynchronously so we’re extra mindful about communication.
• You are passionate and self-motivated, with a demonstrated ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 1+ years of experience working remote as part of a distributed software engineering team
• Experience of shipping and learning in a customer focused environment, creating clarity in ambiguous situations
• Experience building, operating and maintaining resilient, scalable distributed services
• Experience with CSS and HTML, primarily using an existing design system
• Experience with Javascript (and particularly Typescript) in both front-end and back-end contexts
• Experience working in a startup environment where in you feel comfortable making decisions efficiently and communicating them effectively