Staff Software Engineer, Copilot Code Review

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

AI writes code faster than teams can review it, and review is now the bottleneck. Getting an agent to review as well as, or better than, a great engineer who knows your codebase is one of the most important unsolved problems in AI-assisted development.

Copilot code review is GitHub's answer, and more developers get reviews from it than from any other AI reviewer, increasingly on code that agents wrote. Getting review right is hard to define and harder to measure, and no single number settles whether reviews got better. We think the AI products that win are the ones with the best evals, and we're building the best, offline and online.

We run at GitHub scale with an on-call rotation, and we're a fast-growing team competing to build the best AI code reviewer in the world.

As a Staff Software Engineer here, you'll take the problems nobody has answered yet and ship the answer: when a review should stay quiet, or what the agent should learn about a codebase instead of being told. You won't be handed a spec. Other engineers will follow the calls you make, but you lead by building, not by writing the plan.

Responsibilities

• Own product problems that arrive without an answer and ship the answer end to end.
• Advance how the agent reviews: the context it uses, what it remembers, and how it improves over time.
• Decide what a good review looks like for a class of code, then build the evals that hold the product to it.
• Make the quality, latency, and cost tradeoffs that decide how deep a review goes.
• Improve review quality in aggregate and quantify the gain, including when a change wins overall and loses on some pull requests.
• Shape the end-to-end review experience across VS Code, the GitHub Copilot app, and the GitHub Copilot CLI, and pull requests.
• Keep a high-throughput service healthy at GitHub scale, including an on-call rotation.
• Work at the frontier of how software gets built with agents and evolve workflows that make the whole team faster.

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:

• Hands-on experience pushing coding agents to their limits, with a view on where they should and shouldn't own engineering work.
• Experience owning the measurement that makes a model-driven product improvable and catching metrics that move for the wrong reason.
• Depth in Go, Ruby, TypeScript, or Python, with the operational experience of running a distributed service on call at GitHub scale.
• Experience shipping an LLM-backed or agentic product, or the eval infrastructure behind one.

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!