Overview
As a Principal Engineering Manager on the GitHub Developer Experience (DX) team, you will lead a team responsible for foundational systems and services that power GitHub’s internal engineering and development workflows. DX focuses on improving how GitHub engineering teams build, test, and ship software across the company—operating at significant scale and complexity. Our work spans CI/CD platforms, developer tooling, virtualized infrastructure, and the paved paths that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining reliability and security.
We provide the tooling, services, and operational support that allow engineers to deliver changes to production safely and efficiently. This includes running highly available, company-wide CI platforms; partnering closely with application and platform teams to improve reliability and performance; and continuously reducing friction in the developer workflow. The team plays a critical role in maintaining trust in GitHub’s build and test infrastructure while balancing speed, scale, and stability.
GitHub’s continued growth brings both opportunity and complexity. As a Principal Engineering Manager in this role, you will lead a team operating mission-critical systems in a fast-moving environment. You’ll work closely with engineers across the company to improve CI reliability, reduce test flakiness, respond to incidents, and evolve our platforms to meet the needs of a rapidly scaling organization. This role blends people leadership, technical depth, and operational ownership, with a direct impact on the daily experience of GitHub engineers and the quality of the products used by millions of developers worldwide.
Responsibilities
Our team is distributed worldwide, which means we work both asynchronously and real-time. Your typical week would include:
Collaborating with engineering teams, product management, customers, and engineering leadership to align on and understand the problems we want to solve
Unblocking obstacles for your team members 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
Communicating effectively to stakeholders and leadership of progress and risks
Coordinating work within the team and stakeholders, building relationships, and identifying opportunities and areas of improvement
Ensuring the team produces good architectural design outcomes, secure and resilient systems, and quality code
Ensuring the team iteratively ships features and bug fixes, balancing speed to market with future velocity
Conducting 1:1s with direct reports to provide regular feedback and ensure career growth and progression
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
9+ years' experience in software engineering, computer science, or related technical discipline
Proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,
3+ years’ experience leading engineering teams delivering complex infrastructure, platform, release, or validation systems.
Experience setting technical direction and driving execution across multiple engineers or teams in a complex cross-functional environment.
Proven ability to hire, coach, and develop engineers while maintaining high standards for technical quality and operational excellence.
Proven ability to partner across organizations, align stakeholders, and improve reliability, delivery predictability, and engineering effectiveness for business-critical systems.
Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, or related field
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience leading or owning large-scale CI/CD and build systems, including monolith or monorepo environments, with a focus on reliability, performance, and developer experience.
Proven ability to run operationally critical platforms, including incident response, on-call leadership, observability, and cross-org escalation.
Track record of cross-team collaboration and influence, working with application owners and platform teams to drive best practices and paved paths.
Familiarity with test infrastructure and quality challenges at scale, including diagnosing CI failures and reducing flaky tests.
Experienced people manager able to balance execution, operational stability, and long-term platform investment in complex, high-change environments.
Experience driving strategy and execution across multiple dependent engineering teams.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Passionate about fostering good engineering practices and processes
Experience recruiting and retaining healthy teams, managing performance, and calibrating expectations
Experience working remotely and collaborating with distributed teams.
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about **requesting accommodations.**