Software Engineer - GitHub Actions

Overview

GitHub is growing its Engineering team and seeks experienced professionals to elevate our software engineering efforts. As a Software Engineer II at GitHub, you will design and build systems that power collaboration for millions of developers. You will drive technical execution from design through production, contributing to initiatives across distributed teams.

Within GitHub’s ecosystem, Actions powers automation for millions of developers worldwide, enabling them to build, test, and deploy code directly from their repositories. As the backbone of CI/CD workflows across GitHub, Actions processes billions of jobs monthly, from simple builds to complex deployment pipelines spanning multiple environments. Our team owns the core infrastructure and services that make this possible, ensuring reliability at massive scale. We're a group of engineers passionate about developer productivity, tackling challenges in distributed systems, container orchestration, security, and cloud infrastructure. You'll work alongside talented colleagues who value collaboration, operational excellence, and building products that developers love.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions across GitHub Actions services.
• Participate in code reviews, pairing sessions, and technical discussions that raise the quality bar for the team.
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call for first responder rotations and live incidents.
• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and contribute to technical discussions, including design and trade-off considerations.
• Contribute to comprehensive testing strategies, define success metrics, and incorporate customer feedback to drive continuous improvement.
• Contribute to operational excellence by improving system reliability and maintaining monitoring, alerting, and runbooks across Actions services.
• Participate in technical planning that aligns with product goals, helping ensure engineering efforts are appropriately prioritized.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Professional experience in software engineering, computer science, or a related technical discipline, with demonstrated experience coding and shipping production software.
• Hands-on proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages such as C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
• A degree in Computer Science, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Computer Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing or operating distributed systems, container orchestration, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience building or operating CI/CD systems (directly relevant to the Actions domain).
• Experience designing and implementing APIs for service-to-service integration.
• Experience participating in on-call rotations, live-site response, or service-reliability practices (monitoring, alerting, runbooks).

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**.**