Senior Software Engineer, Primer (Design System)

🏢 About GitHub

GitHub is the world's leading platform for agentic software development, powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. With over 180 million developers and more than 77,000 organizations, including 90% of the Fortune 100, GitHub fosters collaboration and innovation. As a remote-first company, GitHub is dedicated to creating an inclusive environment where individuals can do their best work, driving humanitarian efforts and even sending open source to Mars.

🎯 The Role

GitHub is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Primer Engineering team, dedicated to evolving GitHub's open-source design system, Primer. In this role, you will be instrumental in ensuring GitHub's UI is consistent and accessible by supporting the implementation and adoption of reusable design patterns. You'll design, prototype, implement, and ship highly performant user experiences, crafting open-source and inner-source component libraries and developer tooling that empower product teams to build high-quality UI with Primer.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• React JS
• JavaScript
• HTML
• CSS
• TypeScript
• Git
• Jest
• Storybook
• ESLint

💼 What You'll Do

• Design, develop, test, and ship high-quality technical solutions, primarily in React/JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, that scale across multiple GitHub services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teammates to define and implement innovative UX solutions and advance UI quality.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others and enable broad contribution to the design system.
• Write architecture briefs and proposals to guide the future of the design system’s technical health and growth.
• Design and implement well-reasoned component APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call and first responder rotations.
• Partner with feature teams developing new features to share expertise on reusable UI components and coach Primer adoption.
• Leverage AI to build, maintain, and automate our systems, scale contribution, and ensure agents and humans alike can build UI successfully with Primer.

✅ What You'll Need

• 6+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software.
• 4+ years of experience in JavaScript/React.
• 3+ years of experience writing accessible HTML according to WCAG standards.
• 2+ years contributing to or maintaining a UI component library or design system.
• Comfortable with Git version control.
• Experience leading the implementation of complex UI components for multiple use cases within a website or application.
• Experience with WCAG compliance and/or implementing accessibility best practices.

🌟 Nice to Have

• 1+ year of experience providing technical leadership.
• Minimum 2 years' experience as an engineer contributing to design systems or UI/UX using JavaScript and associated tools (e.g., React, TypeScript, Jest, Storybook, ESLint), HTML, and CSS.
• Experience benchmarking UI performance and shipping optimizations.
• Track record of working successfully with designers to implement and fine-tune complex UI.