Staff Software Engineer, Copilot AI Models

About GitHub

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development — powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 180 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate, and more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.

Locations

In this role you can work from Remote, United States

Overview

GitHub is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the GitHub Copilot AI Models team. This role focuses on building, maintaining, and evolving a robust, scalable, and reliable platform that powers GitHub Copilot and its integrations. You will work on highly available backend services and APIs that support Copilot features, ensuring consistent, performant, and safe access at scale.

The ideal candidate has experience building and operating distributed systems in production and enjoys working close to the details of system behavior, reliability, and performance. You care about building services that balance latency, cost, and operational excellence, and you take pride in improving the quality and maintainability of the systems you own.

You will collaborate with a distributed, diverse, and passionate group of engineers and product managers across GitHub and partner teams. The Copilot API platform underpins the reliability and scalability of Copilot features used by developers worldwide. Your work will directly support other engineering teams by enabling seamless integration with Copilot capabilities.

You will contribute through hands-on implementation, thoughtful design decisions, and strong collaboration within your team. You’ll help uphold best practices for system performance and reliability, contribute to technical designs, and identify opportunities to improve the resilience and scalability of Copilot’s core infrastructure. We value developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration, and we believe curiosity and impact drive great engineering at GitHub.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and implement innovative solutions.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others.
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call and first responder rotations.
• Write architecture briefs and proposals, carry out code experiments, and build prototypes to learn how we can achieve planetary scale with our systems.
• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
• Utilize CI/CD tools to set up automated pipelines for continuous integration and delivery.
• Become intimately familiar with the systems you build and take pride in writing maintainable code.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• 9+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

• OR Associate’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 8+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 7+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

• OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 5+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

• OR Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Minimum 4 years experience in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, or a similar language).
• Minimum 4 years experience using general purpose programming languages (e.g., Go, Ruby, or a similar language).
• Minimum 5 years experience with cloud environments and/or Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) concepts.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /Yr.

These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role.

This position will be open for a minimum of 3 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

GitHub values

• Customer-obsessed
• Ship to learn
• Growth mindset
• Own the outcome
• Better together
• Diverse and inclusive

Manager fundamentals

• Model
• Coach
• Care

Leadership principles

• Create clarity
• Generate energy
• Deliver success

Who We Are

GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 million developers and counting. We’re also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world’s software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.

Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We’re remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.

Join us, and let’s change the world, together.

EEO Statement

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!