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Staff Software Engineer, Traffic Team

GitHub

Remote · USJob$140–372K/yrSeen 1 day agoSeen in employer's feed 1 day ago

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At a glance

Compensation
$140–372K/yr
Location
Remote · US
Work Authorization
Not specified

Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.

Job overview

The Staff Software Engineer will work on GitHub’s Traffic Team, which maintains the platform responsible for traffic entering and leaving GitHub and provides load balancing for its services. The role focuses on improving and maintaining traffic-management systems used by developers worldwide. The team is distributed and works remotely, with asynchronous communication across global locations.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

Software EngineeringProduction SoftwareCC++C#JavaJavaScriptGoRubyRustPythonHigh-Traffic ApplicationsPlatform InfrastructureCloud-Native WorkloadsAzureAWSGoogle CloudLoad BalancersDDoS ProtectionLoad SheddingHAProxyOpen-Source Load BalancersGolangPlanetary-Scale SystemsRemote TeamworkWritten CommunicationVerbal Communication

Qualifications

9+ Years Software Engineering or Equivalent ExperienceAssociate's Degree or Related8+ Years Software EngineeringBachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related7+ Years Software EngineeringMaster's Degree or Related5+ Years Software EngineeringDoctorate or Related3+ Years Software Engineering4+ Years High-Traffic Applications4+ Years Cloud-Native Workloads2+ Years Load Balancer Experience

Benefits

Tuition Assistance

Full job description

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 changing the way the world builds software, and we want you to help lead this effort.

The Traffic Team plays a critical role in GitHub's scalability and resiliency. GitHub’s Traffic team is responsible for every packet into and out of GitHub’s edge and delivers a foundational load balancing platform for all of its services. The team’s objective is to ensure that GitHub continues to operate industry-leading services at global scale, and to ensure internal engineering teams have the tools and processes necessary to build on top of our platform with as little friction as possible.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Traffic Team, you will work closely with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team of engineers to improve and maintain part of the platform that millions of developers worldwide rely on in their software development cycle.

The Traffic Team is highly distributed, and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication. You're expected to have strong written communication skills and be able to develop working relationships with coworkers in locations around the globe. As an engineer at GitHub, you'll always be challenged to solve interesting and novel problems that have a real impact on how the world builds software.

Responsibilities

  • Lead technical decision making and architecture

  • Design and implement scalable, reliable and performant solutions for complex problems like rate-limiting, routing, etc.

  • Maintain and improve the GitHub Load Balancer, and other systems related to traffic management at GitHub

  • Write, review, and maintain code primary in Go and Ruby & Rails

  • Mentor other engineers in their technical and architectural decision making

  • Participate in the on-call rotation, and team meetings

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

  • 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 Associate’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ 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 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 Master's Degree 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 Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ 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.

  • 4+ years building and supporting large, high traffic applications at scale within platform/infrastructure domains

  • 4+ years supporting and building cloud native workloads in Azure, AWS or Google Cloud

  • 2+ years experience maintaining a Load Balancer with proven experience in abuse protection mechanisms for DDoS attacks, load shedding, etc.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with HAProxy, or any other open-source Load Balancer

  • 2+ Years of Golang experience

  • Experience building or maintaining planetary scale engineering systems

  • Experience working with a remote, distributed team

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /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.

This position will be open for a minimum of 3 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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

Who We Are

GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 million developers and counting. We’re also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world’s software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.

Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We’re remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.

Join us, and let’s change the world, together.

EEO Statement

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

How this job compares

Set against the 34,885 open Software Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted October 29, 2026.

Pay
  • This posting$140–372K/yr
  • US median$140–222K/yr28,048 salary ranges

This range's midpoint, $256K, is 44% above the US median midpoint ($179K) — in the top quarter of Software Engineer salary ranges across the US.

Openings
Olive Jobs lists 34,885 open Software Engineer jobs across the US. 7% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most across the US
Experience
This posting asks for at least 3 years of experience; Software Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years at the median (28,135 postings).
Education
12,578 of the 34,885 open Software Engineer jobs (36%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on October 29, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.

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