Senior Software Engineer, Identity Platform

GitHub is a leading platform for agentic software development powered by Copilot. The Senior Software Engineer will join the Identity organization to build and guide the technical direction of authentication and authorization services, develop globally distributed backend systems, evaluate emerging identity standards, and mentor engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement backend services in Go (Golang) that power authentication, authorization, and GitHub Apps at global scale
• Partner across engineering and product teams to solve complex identity challenges spanning user authentication, enterprise identity, applications, APIs, and machine identities
• Evaluate emerging identity technologies, protocols, and security patterns, identifying where they can improve GitHub's platform
• Design highly available, globally distributed services with a focus on security, resilience, and operational excellence
• Mentor engineers by sharing identity best practices and helping raise technical depth across the organization
• Participate in on-call rotations and continuously improve the reliability and operability of identity services

Requirements:

• 6+ 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 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ 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 2+ 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
  • OR equivalent experience
• Deep experience with modern identity standards such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML, SCIM, WebAuthn/Passkeys, FIDO2, SSH, JWT, DPoP, and related technologies
• Experience building identity infrastructure for enterprise, cloud, or developer platforms serving millions of users or high request volumes
• Strong understanding of Zero Trust architectures, workload identities, machine-to-machine authentication, and credential lifecycle management
• Experience evaluating and adopting emerging identity technologies and security standards
• Ability to influence technical strategy through architecture, RFCs, mentoring, and cross-organizational collaboration
• Experience contributing to or participating in identity standards bodies, open source identity projects, or developer ecosystems is a plus