Github CEO Thomas Dohmke announced that he is stepping down from the role. He will remain in the company till the end of the year, following which he’ll switch to become “a founder again.”
“With more than [1 billion] repos and forks, and over 150 million developers, GitHub has never been stronger than it is today,” Dohmke wrote. “We have seen more open-source projects with more contributions every year. AI projects have doubled in the last year alone. And our presence in companies of any size is unmatched in the market.”
Prior to his role at Github, Dohmke had helped lead mobile developer tools at Microsoft and worked on GitHub’s acquisition alongside former CEO Nat Friedman. Github was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 in a $7.5 billion all-stock deal. The company’s tools are currently used by over 150 million developers to build, maintain and collaborate on software projects, according to the company. Dohmke said that under his leadership, GitHub expanded globally, earned U.S. FedRAMP certification for federal use and doubled AI projects on the platform.
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While Microsoft did not reveal any details about Dohmke’s successor, Axios reported that GitHub leadership will now report to several Microsoft executives. Microsoft developer division head Julia Liuson will oversee GitHub’s revenue, engineering and support, while Github’s chief product officer Mario Rodriguez, will report to head of product for Microsoft’s AI platform Asha Sharma.
This comes at a time when Github is facing growing competition from companies like Google and Cursor over AI tools for programmers. Dohmke touched on Github’s AI copilot on his blog post announcing his departure, saying, “By launching this new age of developer AI, we’ve made it possible for anyone — no matter what language they speak at home or how fluent they are in programming — to take their spark of creativity and transform it into something real. I am more convinced than ever that the world will soon see one billion developers enabled by billions of AI agents, each imprinting human ingenuity into a new gold rush of software. When that day comes, we’ll know where the path began: with GitHub.”
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“I’ve had the privilege of working with many exceptional human beings, including Hubbers, Microsofties, customers, partners, our GitHub Stars, open-source maintainers, and developers around the world who’ve helped us shape GitHub. From building mobile developer tools, to running the acquisition of GitHub alongside Nat Friedman, to becoming GitHub’s CEO and guiding us into the age of Copilot and AI, it has been the ride of a lifetime,” Dohmke said about his experience with Github. He added that he would be staying on till the end of 2025 “to help with the transition” and that Github and its leadership team will continue its mission “as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization with more details shared soon.”