Principal Software Engineer, Identity & AI Governance

About this role

About 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 seeking a Principal Software Engineer to shape the future of identity and enterprise AI governance across its platform.


Identity is a critical foundation for GitHub’s agentic AI ecosystem, enabling secure interactions between users, applications, and AI agents. As AI adoption scales, systems must support trust, authorization, delegation, and policy enforcement at a global scale.


In this role, you will lead the architecture of Tier-0 identity and governance services powering authentication, authorization, and policy enforcement for GitHub’s ecosystem. These systems must operate with the highest standards of security, reliability, and scalability, serving billions of requests daily.


You will partner across Security, Platform, AI, and Product teams to define strategy, drive architecture, and build the identity and governance control plane for GitHub’s AI-powered future.


Responsibilities

• Lead and influence design discussions for the overall system architecture of complex products and solutions, ensuring they meet security and compliance requirements.
• Establish and mentor others in best practices for testing and assuring the quality of solutions, defining success metrics, and producing maintainable code integrated with downstream dependencies.
• Provide technical leadership during code reviews to ensure solutions meet quality standards, are reliable, and are appropriate for the scale of the product feature.
• Partner with stakeholders such as project managers and technical leads to determine requirements for servic...