Principal 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 Principal Software Engineer here, you'll be a technical owner of how Copilot code review works, and you'll be working out what this job becomes: we build the tool that's changing how engineers work, and this role leads how our own team adapts. This is a hands-on role: you'll be in the code, solving the hardest technical problems yourself, not just guiding the work.

Responsibilities

• Drive how the review agent works: the context it reasons over, the models it runs, and what it carries across reviews.
• Bet on where model capability is heading, and work with model labs and research teams to turn it into better reviews.
• Define what a great AI review is, and hold the product to it with offline evals, online experiments, and production evidence.
• Own the quality of the end-to-end review experience across VS Code, the GitHub Copilot app, and the GitHub Copilot CLI, and pull requests.
• Own the reliability of a high-throughput service running at GitHub scale, including the on-call rotation.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, collaborate across disciplines, and help steer the team and product, all while staying hands-on: experimenting, shipping code, and building evals.
• Work at the frontier of how software gets built with agents and evolve workflows that make the whole team faster.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• 11+ 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 10+ 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 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, 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 Doctorate 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 equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience owning the architecture and the hardest technical calls on a large-scale production system.
• Hands-on experience applying frontier models at scale, with a grounded sense of what they can and can't do.
• Experience owning the evaluation that decides whether a model-driven product is improving and sharpening the evals themselves when they fall short.
• Depth in Go, Ruby, TypeScript, or Python, with the operational experience of running a distributed service on call at GitHub scale.
• Experience building an LLM-backed or agentic product in production or partnering with research teams to ship model capability.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $160,200.00 - USD $425,000.00 /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!