Staff Engineering Manager, Copilot 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 Engineering Manager to lead the Copilot Identity & Safety team, responsible for the cross-cutting safety platform that helps ensure GitHub Copilot delivers secure, responsible, and trustworthy AI experiences at scale. This team owns the safety and governance layer across Copilot experiences, including content safety, code security, identity protections, malicious-use prevention, and agentic workflow controls spanning models, providers, tool integrations, and generated code experiences.

This role combines technical leadership, operational excellence, and cross-functional influence. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in distributed systems, platform architecture, reliability, and security, along with the ability to lead and grow a high-performing engineering team. They will work closely with Microsoft Responsible AI and Digital Safety & Security partners, Applied Sciences teams, and product engineering organizations to drive safety standards, release governance, classifier development, and red-teaming initiatives across GitHub Copilot.

The Copilot Identity & Safety platform is foundational to GitHub's AI strategy. As Staff Engineering Manager, you will lead the team responsible for building scalable safeguards that enable innovation while ensuring reliability, security, and responsible AI outcomes for millions of developers worldwide.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the safety and governance systems powering GitHub Copilot and future AI-driven experiences. We foster a culture centered on customer trust, technical excellence, inclusive collaboration, and thoughtful innovation, where teams work together to make AI-powered software development safer and more effective for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Drive and support technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring that engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new technologies and methodologies where applicable.
• Facilitate cross-team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services.
• Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team's skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices.
• Guide teams in designing scalable, secure, and observable systems that meet business and technical requirements.
• Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data-informed decisions.
• Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations.
• Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements.

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.

• 3+ years people management experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, or a similar language), technologies and software platforms, (e.g., Ruby, React, Go, Javascript/typescript, MySQL, cosmosDB, Elasticsearch), front-end frameworks (e.g., React.js), and / or telemetry dashboard (e.g., Datadog, Sentry, Azure Data Explorer).
• Experience with cloud environments and/or Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) concepts.
• Demonstrated experience with large-scale system architecture and design, particularly in cloud-based environments, with a strong understanding of distributed systems and microservices.
• Experience working closely with product management, design, and other engineering teams to drive cross-functional projects and deliver high-quality products.

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!