Principal Engineering Manager
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 Engineering Manager to lead the development of the GitHub Copilot AI inference platform. This role involves overseeing the allocation and deployment of GitHub's AI resources, managing high-throughput service infrastructure for inference workloads, and improving the experiment-to-production pipeline. This includes operating orchestration frameworks that support generative AI workloads at scale. The ideal candidate will possess a strategic vision, technical leadership in distributed systems and generative AI serving architectures, as well as the ability to mentor senior engineering leaders, build empowered high-trust teams, and foster a culture of technical excellence and experimentation.
The AI infrastructure at GitHub is crucial for the future of software development. As Principal Engineering Manager, you will lead the team responsible for this foundation, ensuring efficient, secure, and business-aligned resource deployment. You will work with a team of architects to guide the platform's evolution through deep technical leadership and organizational stewardship, collaborating with product, infrastructure, and research teams across GitHub and Microsoft to scale, optimize, and safeguard platform integrity.
This is a unique opportunity to shape the systems powering Copilot and other AI-driven experiences globally. We foster a culture that prioritizes developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration, where curiosity and impact drive our development efforts.
Responsibilities
Drive and support technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring that engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new technologies and methodologies where applicable.
Facilitate cross-team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services.
Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team's skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices.
Oversee capacity planning and dynamic traffic shaping to ensure performance, reliability, and compliance.
Guide teams in designing scalable, secure, and observable systems that meet business and technical requirements.
Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data-informed decisions.
Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations.
Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements.
Work with architects to shape GitHub’s long-term vision for AI infrastructure, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
11+ 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 10+ 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 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, 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 PhD 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 equivalent experience.
5+ years people management experience.
Preferred Qualifications
Deep understanding of distributed systems performance, including autoscaling, load balancing, and traffic shaping for inference workloads.
Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high-growth or ambiguous environments.
Compensation Range
The base salary range for this job is USD $160,200.00 - USD $425,000.00 /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.
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!