SSE - Backend & Distributed Systems
Microsoft · Hyderabad, India · 1d ago
As part of this team, you will work on mission-critical platform services that power GitHub's global developer ecosystem. The team owns and operates high-scale distributed systems, including GitHub Packages, GitHub Pages, Email Services, and other foundational developer experience tools and platforms. These services support billions of requests, stringent reliability requirements, and developer workflows used worldwide.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for some of GitHub's most challenging scale, reliability, and operational excellence initiatives. You will lead design and implementation, make sound architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and collaborate across GitHub and Microsoft to deliver durable platform capabilities.
Responsibilities
Lead the design, development, and operation of highly available distributed systems that power critical GitHub platform services.
Drive architecture and technical direction for scalable backend services and platform capabilities using modern engineering practices, automation, and observability.
Define and deliver improvements to service reliability, performance, latency, capacity, security, and operational efficiency for mission-critical workloads.
Own complex features and services throughout their lifecycle, from requirements and design reviews through implementation, rollout, production support, and live-site excellence.
Build automation and reusable platform capabilities that reduce operational overhead and improve engineering productivity across teams.
Lead investigations of complex production issues across distributed systems, storage, networking, and service infrastructure, and drive durable corrective actions.
Partner with engineers and stakeholders across GitHub and Microsoft to align technical strategy and deliver large-scale platform investments and modernization efforts.
Mentor engineers, raise engineering standards through design and code reviews, and leverage AI-assisted workflows to improve software delivery, testing, incident response, and operational excellence.
Qualifications
Required
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
7+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production systems.
Expert coding skills in one or more programming languages such as C#, Java, Go, C++, Python, Ruby, or similar, with a track record of delivering maintainable production software.
Deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, API design, and distributed systems fundamentals.
Proven experience designing and operating large-scale backend services, cloud systems, or platform infrastructure with high availability and reliability requirements.
Strong experience with databases, caching systems, messaging technologies, service-oriented architectures, and observability practices.
Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous technical projects, influence architecture across teams, mentor engineers, and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Preferred
Experience with public cloud platforms, Kubernetes, and containerized services in production.
Experience architecting high-throughput, highly available internet-scale systems and planning for capacity, resilience, and disaster recovery.
Strong knowledge of observability, incident management, reliability engineering, security, and production operations.
Experience with GitHub, CI/CD systems, developer platforms, package management ecosystems, or internal platform products.
Familiarity with Go, Ruby, MySQL, Kubernetes, distributed storage, service infrastructure, and large-scale system migrations.
What Makes This Role Exciting
Lead work on services operating at hyperscale, with billions of requests and global developer impact.
Own production systems where reliability, performance, security, and operational excellence directly affect millions of developers.
Shape technical direction and drive end-to-end engineering outcomes across complex, multi-team initiatives.
Collaborate with and influence GitHub engineering teams worldwide while mentoring other engineers.
Solve complex distributed systems, concurrency, scalability, and reliability challenges every day.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.
Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.
#GithubIndia#
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.