Staff Software Engineer, CoPilot Agent Platform

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 shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents. The GitHub Cloud Agent platform provides the secure, scalable infrastructure that enables agents to autonomously perform complex software-development tasks for millions of developers and organizations.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for one of GitHub’s most ambitious, cutting-edge platforms. You will define the technical direction and lead the architecture and evolution of the cloud infrastructure powering GitHub’s next generation of autonomous agents. You will build secure, durable, globally scalable systems that orchestrate diverse compute workloads, agent harnesses, custom tools, support authentication, and identity for agents. Operating at the frontier of AI-powered software development, you will solve unprecedented infrastructure challenges while establishing the enterprise-grade security, reliability, and isolation required to run trusted agents at GitHub scale

You will collaborate with staff and principal engineers and partner teams across GitHub to translate ambitious product goals into reliable platform architecture. You will write architecture proposals, prototype new approaches, establish engineering standards, and guide teams through complex technical decisions. You will also own the operational health of the platform, ensuring strong security, observability, availability, performance, and cost efficiency as adoption and workloads grow.

The ideal candidate combines deep distributed-systems and cloud-infrastructure expertise with strong technical leadership. You work autonomously, communicate clearly across organizational boundaries, mentor other engineers, and balance long-term architectural vision with incremental delivery. Your work will establish the foundation on which GitHub builds and scales the next generation of AI-powered software-development experiences.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services and become intimately familiar with the systems you build and take pride in writing maintainable code.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others; support teams in producing extensible and maintainable code, ensuring integration with downstream dependencies and adherence to quality standards.
• Help cultivate an environment where team members are empowered and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and belonging.
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call for first responder rotations and live incidents.
• Write architecture briefs and proposals and carry out code experiments.
• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
• Maintain executional and operational excellence within and potentially across teams/organizations.
• Apply debugging tools and telemetry to verify assumptions, proactively resolve issues, and optimize code performance and maintainability.
• 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.
• Work with the team to understand technical constraints, and develop, communicate, and track against realistic plans to consistently ship products, features, and bug fixes.

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

• 5+ years of experience operating distributed backend systems at a senior level, including API design, data modeling, and production ownership.

• 1+ years of experience building and shipping AI/ML-powered features in production as a software engineer.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands on experience with Go in production, ideally on multi-tenant, high availability services.
• Experience with NoSQL or document databases (Azure CosmosDB or comparable) and event driven architectures (Event Hubs, Kafka, or similar).
• Experience with spec first API development (OpenAPI/Swagger) and generated server/client bindings.
• Experience with feature flag driven development and staged, reversible rollouts in a service used across multiple regions or tenancy models (for example, standard SaaS plus government/sovereign cloud style deployments).
• Familiarity with Kubernetes/Kustomize based deployment and Terraform managed cloud infrastructure.

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!