• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of professional experience in frontend development, with a strong proficiency in modern JavaScript frameworks (especially React) and with the last 4 years in a senior technical role (e.g. Staff / Principal or equivalent)
• 7+ years of experience in designing, building, and maintaining large-scale frontend applications and the backend systems that support these with an emphasis on performance, scalability, and maintainability
• 7+ years of providing technical leadership and mentorship, guiding teams to deliver high-quality software solutions, demonstrating a proactive bias for action in ensuring timely execution of projects and initiatives
• 3+ years of experience constructing APIs for front-end applications OR proficiency consuming those APIs while leveraging associated client libraries like Apollo, TRPC, Relay, etc

Desirable

• GitHub is revolutionizing the way developers collaborate and build software, and we are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to pioneer the UI Platform space, which entails areas of frontend performance, accessibility, consistency, and availability
• This role is pivotal to defining GitHub's future UI architecture, ensuring accessibility for all users, delivering an exceptional user interface, enhancing developer experience, and positioning GitHub as a leader in UI innovation, thereby empowering millions of developers worldwide
• Lead the architectural design and development of GitHub's web UI platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, accessibility, and performance
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and prioritize projects aimed at enhancing GitHub's user experience
• Establish best practices, patterns, and guidelines for frontend development, fostering a culture of excellence and innovation
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to frontend engineering teams, promoting continuous learning and growth
• Drive initiatives to improve engineering processes, tooling, and automation to streamline development workflows
• Champion accessibility, performance, and usability standards, ensuring that GitHub's web interfaces are accessible to all users and optimized for performance
• Stay abreast of emerging frontend technologies, trends, and best practices, advocating for their adoption when beneficial to GitHub's development ecosystem
• Collaborate with product management and design teams to translate user needs and business requirements into technical solutions
• Serve as a subject matter expert on web UI development, representing GitHub in industry conferences, forums, and technical communities
• A week in the life of a Principal Engineer might consist of:
• Collaborating with other Principal Engineers to define the future of GitHub engineering and working together to implement that vision
• Collaborating with design, analytics, support, and product management to understand the problems we want to solve and exploring how we can solve them
• Digging into the most important issues the department is tackling by asking questions, creating plans, recognizing pitfalls, raising concerns, and creating clarity
• Discussing and collaboratively solving engineering and product problems with engineering collaborators in Slack or Zoom
• Planning and executing large-scale company-wide rollouts and migrations
• Supporting company-wide initiatives
• Bringing key plans and execution ideas to the management team
• Mentoring other engineers at all experience levels
• Providing comprehensive and high quality code or design reviews when requested by other teams at GitHub
• Reviewing teammates' Pull Requests and providing helpful feedback
• Serve as an engineering representative for critical customer conversations to discover what they love and what their pain points are
• Embedding in a squad periodically to enable others to tackle challenges and stretch assignments
• As a part of Engineering technical leadership, advising on key initiatives, gaps, and technical pitfalls we need to be aware of