How to Apply to GitHub

10 min read Last updated March 12, 2026 77 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Your GitHub profile is your most powerful application asset — invest time in curating your repositories, contribution history, and profile README before applying
  • GitHub has been remote-first for over a decade, so demonstrating experience with asynchronous communication and distributed collaboration is essential for every role
  • The interview process emphasizes real-world problem solving over algorithmic puzzles — expect to work in your own development environment during technical screens
  • Values alignment matters as much as technical skill — prepare concrete examples of customer obsession, growth mindset, and inclusive team contributions
  • GitHub uses Greenhouse ATS with iCIMS on the candidate portal — submit clean, single-column PDF resumes with standard section headers for reliable parsing
  • Open source contributions carry significant weight — even non-code contributions like documentation and issue triage demonstrate cultural fit
  • GitHub is a Microsoft subsidiary but maintains its own distinct engineering culture — understanding both the independence and the connection helps you navigate conversations effectively
  • The company is investing heavily in AI through Copilot — candidates with machine learning, LLM, or AI-assisted development experience are in particularly high demand

About GitHub

GitHub is the world's largest and most influential code hosting and developer collaboration platform, home to over 100 million developers and more than 330 million repositories. Acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion, GitHub operates as a largely independent subsidiary with its own engineering culture, leadership, and hiring practices. The company's mission is to accelerate human progress through developer collaboration, and it builds the tools that power modern software development — from version control and code review to CI/CD pipelines, security scanning, and the AI-powered GitHub Copilot. Headquartered in San Francisco, GitHub was a pioneer of remote-first work culture long before the pandemic made distributed teams mainstream. Today, GitHub employees (known internally as Hubbers) work from locations across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, India, and Japan. The company's engineering teams process billions of API requests daily, run tens of thousands of deployments per year, and maintain the infrastructure that millions of developers depend on. GitHub's product portfolio continues to expand with significant investment in AI through Copilot, security through Advanced Security, and enterprise collaboration through GitHub Enterprise. For job seekers in the technology industry, GitHub represents one of the most prestigious employers — a company where your work directly shapes how the global developer community builds software.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Explore Open Positions on GitHub Careers

    Start at github.careers, GitHub's dedicated careers portal. You can search openings by keyword, location, job category, and experience level. GitHub organizes roles across departments including Engineering, Product, Design, Security, Site Reliability, Data Science, Marketing, Sales, and Corporate Functions. The careers site also features detailed information about GitHub's culture, Communities of Belonging, and employee benefits. Take time to read about the teams you are interested in — GitHub values candidates who demonstrate genuine understanding of the company's mission and products.

  2. 2
    Prepare Your Application Materials

    GitHub's application process accepts resume uploads and LinkedIn profile connections through their applicant tracking system. Before applying, ensure your resume is tailored to the specific role and highlights relevant experience with distributed systems, open source contributions, or developer tools depending on the position. Critically, polish your GitHub profile — at a company built on code collaboration, your public repositories, contribution graph, open source involvement, and code quality serve as a living portfolio that hiring managers will review alongside your formal resume.

  3. 3
    Submit Your Application Through the ATS

    GitHub uses an applicant tracking system to manage applications. Submit your resume, cover letter (if applicable), and any supplementary materials through the online portal. The system supports common file formats including PDF and Word documents. Some roles may include supplementary questions about your experience with specific technologies, your approach to remote collaboration, or your connection to the developer community. Answer these thoughtfully — they help recruiters assess culture fit beyond your resume. After submission, you will receive a confirmation email, and your profile is retained for approximately 12 months for potential matching with future opportunities.

  4. 4
    Recruiter Screen and Initial Conversations

    If your application moves forward, a GitHub recruiter will reach out to schedule an initial phone or video screen. This conversation typically covers your background, interest in GitHub, salary expectations, and high-level technical qualifications. The recruiter will also explain the specific interview process for your role, expected timeline, and answer questions about the team and working culture. GitHub's recruiters are known for being transparent about the process and providing context about what each subsequent interview stage will evaluate. Use this conversation to ask informed questions about the team's current priorities and technical challenges.

  5. 5
    Technical and Behavioral Interview Rounds

    GitHub's interview process typically includes multiple rounds tailored to the role. For engineering positions, expect live coding exercises where you solve problems in real time (often using your preferred language and environment), system design discussions where you architect solutions to scaled infrastructure problems, and technical deep-dives into your past work. All roles include behavioral interviews focused on GitHub's values — customer obsession, growth mindset, diversity and inclusion, and collaborative problem-solving. Senior and staff-level candidates face additional architecture and leadership evaluation. Interviews are conducted remotely via video conferencing, reflecting GitHub's distributed work model.

  6. 6
    Values Alignment and Team Matching

    GitHub places significant emphasis on values alignment throughout the interview process. Beyond technical skills, interviewers assess whether candidates demonstrate a growth mindset, genuine care for the developer community, and comfort with asynchronous communication in a remote-first environment. For some roles, the final stages include conversations with the hiring manager and potential teammates to ensure mutual fit. GitHub's leadership principles of model, coach, care guide management hiring decisions specifically. The company looks for people who create clarity, generate energy, and deliver success — principles inherited from the broader Microsoft leadership framework but applied with GitHub's distinct engineering-first culture.

  7. 7
    Offer, Negotiation, and Onboarding

    Successful candidates receive a competitive offer that includes base salary, equity (Microsoft RSUs), comprehensive health benefits, learning and development stipends, and home office setup support. GitHub is transparent about compensation bands and supports negotiation. Once you accept, onboarding is designed for remote employees — you will receive equipment, access to internal systems, and a structured ramp-up period. New Hubbers are paired with onboarding buddies and given time to explore the codebase, internal documentation, and team norms before taking on production responsibilities.

Resume Tips for GitHub

critical

Showcase Your GitHub Profile as a Portfolio

Your GitHub profile is arguably more important than your resume when applying to GitHub. Ensure your profile has a professional README, pinned repositories that demonstrate your best work, meaningful commit messages, and evidence of code review participation. Hiring managers at GitHub regularly review candidates' public contributions, so clean up any repositories you want to highlight and archive those you do not. If you contribute to open source projects, make sure those contributions are visible and well-documented.

critical

Quantify Impact on Developer Tools and Platforms

GitHub builds products used by millions of developers, so they value candidates who understand scale. Use specific metrics in your resume — requests per second handled, deployment frequency improvements, reduction in incident response times, number of users served, or API latency percentiles. Frame your experience in terms of developer experience impact whenever possible. For example, instead of saying you built a CI pipeline, explain how it reduced build times by a specific percentage for a team of a specific size.

critical

Highlight Remote and Asynchronous Collaboration Experience

GitHub has been remote-first since before the pandemic and operates across dozens of time zones. Your resume should demonstrate comfort with asynchronous communication, written documentation, and distributed team collaboration. Mention experience with tools like GitHub Issues, pull request workflows, RFC processes, or internal documentation systems. If you have led or contributed to projects across multiple time zones, call that out explicitly — it directly maps to how GitHub operates daily.

recommended

Demonstrate Open Source Involvement and Community Engagement

GitHub's identity is deeply tied to open source software. Whether you maintain your own projects, contribute to established ones, or participate in developer communities, include this on your resume. Mention specific projects by name, your role (maintainer, contributor, reviewer), and the impact of your contributions. Even non-code contributions like documentation, issue triage, or community moderation are valued. This signals cultural alignment with GitHub's mission of making collaboration accessible to every developer.

recommended

Use Clean, Parseable Formatting for ATS Compatibility

Submit your resume in PDF format with standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills, Projects) and avoid complex formatting like tables, columns, headers/footers with critical information, or embedded images. GitHub's ATS parses uploaded resumes to extract structured data for recruiter search and matching. Use a straightforward, single-column layout with clear hierarchy to ensure all your information is captured correctly by the system.

recommended

Align Your Skills Section with GitHub's Technical Stack

GitHub's infrastructure runs on Ruby on Rails, Go, TypeScript, React, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, and cloud services. Their AI products leverage Python and machine learning frameworks. Tailor your skills section to highlight technologies relevant to the specific role, but be honest — GitHub interviews test depth of knowledge, not keyword matching. If you have experience with GitHub Actions, GitHub API, or building developer tools, these are particularly relevant and should be prominently featured.

nice_to_have

Include Contributions to Developer Education and Mentorship

GitHub invests heavily in developer education through GitHub Education, GitHub Skills, and community programs. If you have experience mentoring junior developers, contributing to educational content, speaking at conferences, writing technical blog posts, or teaching coding workshops, include these activities. They demonstrate alignment with GitHub's broader mission of accelerating human progress through collaboration and lowering barriers to entry in software development.

ATS System: Greenhouse

GitHub uses Greenhouse as its primary applicant tracking system for managing job postings and candidate pipelines, with iCIMS integrated into their careers portal for the candidate-facing application experience. Greenhouse is one of the most widely adopted ATS platforms in the technology industry, known for structured hiring workflows and strong integration with recruiter tools. When you apply through github.careers, your application data flows through this system for resume parsing, recruiter review, and interview scheduling.

  • Submit your resume in PDF format for the most reliable parsing — Greenhouse handles PDF parsing well and preserves formatting better than Word documents
  • Use standard section headers like Experience, Education, Skills, and Projects so the ATS parser can correctly categorize your information
  • Include relevant keywords from the job description naturally within your experience bullets — Greenhouse supports keyword search for recruiters reviewing candidate pools
  • Avoid tables, multi-column layouts, and text boxes that can confuse the parser and cause information to be extracted out of order
  • Fill out all required fields completely in the application form — incomplete applications may be deprioritized in recruiter queues
  • Your application data is retained for approximately 12 months, allowing recruiters to resurface your profile for future roles that match your skills

Complete Greenhouse Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

GitHub's interview culture reflects its identity as a remote-first, developer-centric organization.

All interviews are conducted virtually via video conferencing, and the company has refined its remote interview process over more than a decade of distributed work. The atmosphere is intentionally collaborative rather than adversarial — interviewers aim to see candidates at their best, not to trick them or create artificial pressure. For engineering roles, the technical interview typically includes a live coding session where candidates work in their own development environment (IDE, terminal, whatever they prefer) rather than on a whiteboard or proprietary coding platform. This reflects GitHub's philosophy that developers produce their best work in familiar tools. System design interviews focus on real-world architecture problems relevant to GitHub's scale — think designing a notification system for millions of users, architecting a code search engine, or building a reliable webhook delivery system. Behavioral interviews at GitHub assess alignment with the company's core values: customer obsession, growth mindset, and fostering diverse and inclusive teams. Interviewers use structured rubrics to evaluate responses consistently across candidates. Expect questions about how you handle disagreements in code review, how you approach unfamiliar technical domains, and how you have contributed to inclusive team environments. GitHub's leadership principles — model, coach, care — shape how management candidates are evaluated. The company draws from Microsoft's framework of creating clarity, generating energy, and delivering success, but applies these through GitHub's own engineering-first lens. Senior candidates should be prepared to discuss how they have influenced technical direction, mentored others, and made decisions with incomplete information. The overall interview timeline typically spans two to four weeks from initial recruiter screen to offer, though this varies by role and seniority. GitHub's recruiting team is generally responsive and transparent about timeline expectations throughout the process.

What GitHub Looks For

  • Deep technical expertise in relevant domains — GitHub hires specialists who can operate at scale, whether in distributed systems, security, machine learning, frontend performance, or developer tooling
  • Genuine passion for developer tools and the open source ecosystem — candidates who use GitHub daily and understand developer workflows from personal experience stand out significantly
  • Strong written communication skills — in a remote-first company that operates asynchronously across time zones, the ability to write clear documentation, pull request descriptions, and technical proposals is essential
  • Growth mindset and intellectual curiosity — GitHub values people who seek out unfamiliar problems, learn from failures, and continuously expand their technical range
  • Collaborative approach to engineering — candidates who demonstrate experience with code review, pair programming, RFC processes, and cross-team coordination align well with how GitHub builds software
  • Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion — GitHub maintains active Communities of Belonging and expects all employees to contribute to an inclusive culture where everyone can bring their authentic self to work
  • Customer empathy and product thinking — even in deeply technical roles, GitHub values engineers who think about how their work impacts the developer experience for the platform's 100 million users
  • Comfort with ambiguity and ownership — GitHub operates with significant autonomy at the team level, so candidates who can define problems, propose solutions, and drive execution with minimal hand-holding are highly valued

Frequently Asked Questions

What is GitHub's interview process like for software engineers?
GitHub's software engineering interview process typically consists of four to six stages spread over two to four weeks. It begins with a recruiter phone screen covering your background, motivations, and salary expectations. Next comes a technical phone screen or take-home exercise depending on the team. The core interview loop includes a live coding session in your own development environment, a system design discussion focused on real-world distributed systems problems at GitHub's scale, and one or two behavioral interviews assessing values alignment. Senior and staff-level candidates may face additional architecture reviews and leadership evaluation. All interviews are conducted remotely via video conferencing, and interviewers use structured rubrics to ensure consistency across candidates.
Does GitHub hire remote employees, and what locations are supported?
Yes, GitHub is a remote-first company and has operated with a distributed workforce since well before the COVID-19 pandemic. GitHub employees work from locations across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, India, and Japan. While GitHub has a headquarters in San Francisco, the vast majority of employees work remotely. Job postings specify which locations or regions are eligible for each role, as legal and tax requirements vary by jurisdiction. GitHub's remote culture includes asynchronous communication norms, comprehensive home office stipends, and team offsites for in-person connection several times per year.
How important is my GitHub profile when applying to work at GitHub?
Your GitHub profile carries substantial weight in the evaluation process, particularly for engineering and technical roles. Hiring managers and interviewers frequently review candidates' public repositories, contribution graphs, commit quality, pull request participation, and open source involvement. A well-maintained GitHub profile with a professional README, pinned repositories showcasing your best work, meaningful commit messages, and evidence of collaborative development serves as a living portfolio that complements your resume. You do not need to have thousands of contributions, but demonstrating consistent engagement, clean code practices, and thoughtful documentation can differentiate you from candidates with similar formal qualifications.
What applicant tracking system does GitHub use, and how should I format my resume?
GitHub uses Greenhouse as its primary applicant tracking system, with iCIMS integrated into the candidate-facing careers portal at github.careers. For optimal parsing, submit your resume as a PDF with a clean, single-column layout and standard section headings such as Experience, Education, Skills, and Projects. Avoid tables, multi-column formatting, text boxes, and headers or footers containing critical information, as these elements can cause parsing errors. Include relevant keywords from the job description naturally within your experience descriptions, since recruiters use keyword search within Greenhouse to surface candidates. Your application data is retained for approximately 12 months, so even if you are not selected for one role, recruiters may reach out for future positions that match your profile.
What programming languages and technologies does GitHub use internally?
GitHub's core platform is built primarily on Ruby on Rails, which has been the foundation of the application since its founding. Over the years, the engineering team has introduced Go for performance-critical backend services, TypeScript and React for frontend development, and Python for machine learning and data science workloads including GitHub Copilot. The infrastructure layer relies on MySQL as the primary database, Redis for caching, Elasticsearch for code and repository search, and Kubernetes for container orchestration. GitHub also makes extensive use of its own products — GitHub Actions for CI/CD, GitHub Codespaces for development environments, and GitHub Advanced Security for code scanning. Familiarity with any combination of these technologies is valuable, though the specific requirements vary significantly by team and role.
How does GitHub approach diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring?
GitHub has made diversity, equity, and inclusion a core organizational priority that directly influences hiring practices. The company maintains Communities of Belonging — employee resource groups and affinity communities that serve as foundational elements of their culture. In the hiring process, GitHub uses structured interviews with standardized rubrics to reduce unconscious bias, and interview panels are designed to include diverse perspectives. Job descriptions are reviewed for inclusive language, and the recruiting team actively sources candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. During interviews, candidates are evaluated on their commitment to fostering inclusive environments, and behavioral questions specifically assess how applicants have contributed to team diversity and psychological safety in previous roles.
What benefits and compensation does GitHub offer employees?
GitHub offers a comprehensive compensation package that reflects its position as a leading technology employer and Microsoft subsidiary. Base salaries are competitive with top-tier technology companies, and equity compensation comes in the form of Microsoft RSUs (Restricted Stock Units) which vest over a standard four-year schedule. Benefits include comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance, generous paid time off, parental leave, mental health support, and wellness programs. GitHub provides home office setup stipends for remote employees, learning and development budgets for conferences and courses, and social impact programs including donation matching. The company is transparent about compensation bands for roles and supports open discussion during the offer and negotiation process. Specific benefits may vary by country and region based on local requirements.
What is GitHub Copilot, and are there roles specifically focused on AI?
GitHub Copilot is GitHub's AI-powered coding assistant, built on large language models and trained on publicly available code. It provides real-time code suggestions, natural language to code generation, chat-based development assistance, and automated pull request summaries. The Copilot product team is one of the fastest-growing organizations within GitHub, and the company is actively hiring across multiple AI-related disciplines including machine learning engineering, applied research, AI infrastructure, product management for AI features, and AI safety and responsible development. If you have experience with large language models, prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, or building AI-powered developer tools, GitHub is particularly interested. The AI investment extends beyond Copilot to security scanning, code review automation, and intelligent search across the platform.
Can I apply to multiple roles at GitHub simultaneously?
Yes, you can apply to multiple open positions at GitHub, but you should be strategic about it. The careers portal allows you to submit separate applications for different roles, and each application is reviewed independently by the relevant recruiting team. However, applying to too many unrelated positions can signal a lack of focus to recruiters. A strong approach is to identify two or three roles that genuinely match your skills and experience, then tailor your resume and application responses for each one specifically. If a recruiter sees your applications and believes you are a better fit for a different role than the one you applied for, they may proactively suggest a redirect. Your profile data is retained in the system for approximately 12 months, so recruiters can also surface your information for roles that open after your initial application.

Open Positions

GitHub currently has 77 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 77 open positions at GitHub

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