GitHub is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Primer Engineering team.
This team is responsible for evolving GitHub’s open source design system, Primer. Primer maintainers play a vital role in ensuring GitHub UI is consistent and accessible by supporting and improving the implementation and adoption of reusable design patterns.
In this role, you’ll collaborate closely with designers and multidisciplinary teammates to grow and improve our component libraries, from designing a balanced component API to maturing components for stable release. You’ll also seek feedback from product and platform engineers to ensure a smooth and reliable developer experience, making it easier for consumers to build high-quality UI with Primer.
If you enjoy the challenge of building design systems at scale and aim to deliver an equally empowering end user and developer experience, the Primer Engineering team at GitHub might be the place for you.
What we're looking for:
Senior Engineers at GitHub are strong individual contributors; they're given a lot of autonomy and trust to work on high impact projects. For this specific role, we're looking for someone who values the following:
- Systems thinking: Our team has to apply decisions holistically, making sure to look at new patterns in context with the larger system of the product.
- Inclusive design: GitHub is a home for all developers and our design system should reflect that, which means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives and abilities. Designing and developing for inclusivity and accessibility first can open up our product for more people.
- Creating together: Getting to the best result is our focus. This may involve input and contributions from designers, engineers, and product partners working across both platform and product concerns – and ideally all of the above. Facilitating collaboration between disciplines and teams is key to evolving the design system alongside the needs of the product.
- Progress and impact: Our team often works on the meta, so it's easy to get caught up in the details. We have to be mindful of this and ensure we’re continuously driving toward decisions given the information available. This means being solutions oriented, seeking opportunities to ship iteratively, and prioritizing progress over correctness when it's the right call.
- Candidness: We encourage candidness and recognize its role in building trust between peers and leadership. It can take time and effort to get there, but it's worth it. Making decisions for projects, design patterns, and processes will yield better results when we can get to the “real talk.”
Responsibilities:
- Write, review and maintain code primarily in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. You will be a core contributor to Primer React, and may also push changes to our Rails library, Primer ViewComponents.
- Lead the implementation and maturation of complex UI components in our design system, including accessibility remediations and features.
- Work closely with designers to define component APIs, provide feedback, make recommendations, and propose improvements.
- Provide code review on internal and external contributions to the system.
- Document the systems you help build. Contribute to training and onboarding materials.
- Prototype, experiment, and create demos to find the right solutions.
- Participate in on-call rotations with your team during business hours. Triage and respond to issues and advocate for opportunities to improve service health.
- Partner with select teams developing new features to share expertise and coach Primer adoption as projects move from conception to launch, with a view toward growing the product team’s systems thinking practices.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Experience as an engineer contributing to design systems
- Several years of engineering experience as an individual contributor
- Proficient in using Git version control and confident in working with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
- Knowledgeable and experienced in leading the implementation of complex components for multiple use cases within a website or application, preferably with React and associated tooling including TypeScript, Jest, Storybook, and ESLint
- Experience successfully collaborating with designers to implement and fine-tune complex and accessible UI elements, ensuring WCAG compliance and implementing accessibility best practices when necessary
Preferred Qualifications:
Think of this list as a descriptive sketch, not a checklist of requirements. Be comfortable applying even if you don’t have all of them.
- You have led development of or contributed to frameworks used by other engineers, such as internal or open source component libraries, styling systems, or utilities for developer experience.
- You are familiar with developing in Ruby on Rails and/or the ViewComponent framework, and feel comfortable pushing Rails code.
- You are passionate about building accessible and inclusive products, with proven results in identifying and remediating WCAG violations.
- You have experience analyzing or auditing code for accessibility issues.
- You have experience working on developer tools and/or a developer-focused product.
Location: Location: In this role, you can work remotely from anywhere in the United Kingdom.
#LI-Remote
Who We Are:
As the global home for all developers, GitHub is the complete AI-powered developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 100 million people, including developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to build amazing things together across 330+ million repositories. With all the collaborative features of GitHub, it has never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code.
Leadership Principles:
Customer Obsessed - Trust by Default - Ship to Learn - Own the Outcome - Growth Mindset - Global Product, Global Team - Anything is Possible - Practice Kindness
Why You Should Join:
At GitHub, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hubbers) to do the best work of their lives. We've designed one of the coolest workspaces in San Francisco (HQ), where many Hubbers work, snack, and create daily. The rest of our Hubbers work remotely around the globe. Check out an updated list of where we can hire here: https://github.com/about/careers/remote
We are also committed to keeping Hubbers healthy, motivated, focused and creative. We've designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we've built a place where we truly love working, we think you will too.
GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!
Please note that benefits vary by country. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask your Talent Partner.