How to Answer: "Why Do You Want to Work at GitHub?"

"Why do you want to work at GitHub?" has a property almost no other company's version has: the interviewer can check your answer against your public life. GitHub recruiters routinely review candidates' GitHub profiles during application screening, which means your claimed relationship with the platform (contributions, projects, even issue etiquette) is visible before your first call. An answer that says "I love open source" over an empty profile contradicts itself; an answer grounded in how you actually use the platform compounds itself.

GitHub's identity supplies the material: the home of open source and the daily tool of roughly every developer on earth, a remote-first company since long before it was fashionable, owned by Microsoft but culturally distinct, and now betting heavily on AI-assisted development with Copilot.

What the Interviewer Is Listening For

1. A real relationship with the platform. Not "I use GitHub" (everyone does) but specifics: open-source work you have shipped or maintained, workflows you have built on Actions, opinions about code review culture, or what Copilot changed in your work. Your profile should corroborate the story you tell.
2. Developer empathy as a motivation. GitHub builds tools for developers, and its strongest engineers are people who care about developer experience the way consumer-product people care about users. Wanting to fix the tools you live in is the native motivation here.
3. Remote-first fit, genuinely held. GitHub's culture is remote and heavily asynchronous: written communication, pull-request-centric collaboration, and documentation as a first-class skill. Motivation that includes wanting to work that way, with evidence you can, matters more here than at office-centric companies.
4. A considered take on the AI moment. GitHub sits at the center of AI-assisted development. You do not need to bet your answer on Copilot, but awareness of how the platform's role is changing signals you are joining the company of now.

A Three-Part Structure

Part 1: The platform hook (2 to 3 sentences). Your genuine connection: the open-source project, the workflow, the developer-experience conviction.

Part 2: Your evidence (3 to 4 sentences). Work that maps: developer tools built, open-source maintained, platform-scale systems, or async-remote collaboration done well, with specifics.

Part 3: The direction (1 to 2 sentences). What you want to build there.

Sample Answer

"GitHub is the only product I have used every working day for ten years, and the moment that made me want to work here was watching my own behavior change: I maintain a mid-size open-source library, around 2,000 stars, and I noticed that half my maintainer time is review, triage, and Actions plumbing, which means GitHub's product decisions shape my life more than my employer's do. That gives me strong opinions I would love to act on: our CI matrix costs, review-queue ergonomics for maintainers, and where Copilot genuinely helps triage versus where it adds noise. Professionally I have built the internal developer platform for a 400-engineer org (golden-path templates, CI, and review tooling), and cut median time-to-first-review from two days to four hours, so developer experience is not an abstraction to me; it is the job I already chose. I also work best in writing, async, across time zones, which I understand is how GitHub actually runs. I would most want to work on the code review or Actions side of the product."

A verifiable open-source life, professional developer-experience evidence with a number, remote-fit stated with substance, and a direction.

Mistakes That Sink This Answer

• Claims your profile contradicts. Do not center open-source passion you cannot show. Center what is true: professional platform work, daily-user expertise, and developer empathy all work without a star count.
• Generic developer-tools enthusiasm. "I want to build tools for developers" is a category, not a reason. Name the workflow you would fix.
• Ignoring the remote dimension. At a remote-first company, saying nothing about how you work is a missed signal; wanting an office-centric experience is a mismatch worth discovering early.
• Treating GitHub as generic Microsoft. GitHub operates with its own culture and brand. Motivation framed around Microsoft's scale misses what is distinct about the subsidiary you are actually joining.

Prepare the Rest of the Loop

This question leads into a process built around realistic work: a take-home, pairing, and code review. See What is the GitHub interview process like? for the structure, Top GitHub behavioral interview questions for the remote-collaboration probes, and Grokking Modern Behavioral Interview for the evidence-based answering method.