Senior Software Engineer, Mission Control

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

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 organizations have adopted GitHub Copilot.

Mission Control is the platform team behind GitHub's Copilot Coding Agent and the wider agentic developer experience. Internally, the service is known as the "Session Service" or "Task API": it is the system of record for every AI agent session and task created on GitHub.

Every time Copilot is assigned to an Issue, every copilot --remote or --cloud CLI session, every VS Code Chat, JetBrains Chat, or Copilot Chat conversation on github.com, its full lifecycle, from creation, through steering and events, to completion, is tracked, authorized, and served by the Go services this team owns.

This is a high-leverage platform role. You'll help scale a service that already sits in the critical path for every Copilot agent surface (CLI, VS Code, JetBrains, github.com chat, and the cloud coding agent itself), while also contributing to the next generation of agent capabilities: remote steering from web and mobile, host and enterprise managed policy enforcement, and the Agent Host Protocol (AHP) that lets any compliant client attach to a running agent environment.

We're looking for an engineer who can operate across the stack (API design, Go services, distributed data, and the security/authorization model that governs who can do what) and who enjoys foundational, cross-team problems. You should be comfortable owning significant components end to end, and driving designs that hold up under scale, security review, and a rapidly evolving product surface.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the Sessions and Tasks APIs (Go, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Blob Storage, Event Hubs) that back every Copilot agent surface: Copilot Coding Agent, Copilot CLI, VS Code Chat, JetBrains Chat, and Copilot Chat on github.com.
• Own and evolve the agent registry and remote steering model, including the policies that decide who can create, edit, or remotely control a session (org/enterprise settings, MDM host managed settings, SSO organization requirements, and staff/internal bypass rules).
• Drive spec first API design: propose changes to the OpenAPI description, regenerate strict server bindings, and coordinate breaking or additive schema changes across client and platform teams (copilot-agent-runtime, sweagentd, copilot-api, the github/github monolith, and github-ui).
• Write architecture decision records and design proposals for new platform capabilities (for example: the Agent Host Protocol for user managed and sandboxed environments, token sealing and minting for secure relay, and unified steering across synchronous and asynchronous agents).
• Ship safely at scale using staged, feature flag gated rollouts (observe-then-enforce patterns) across dotcom, GHES, and Proxima tenants.
• Contribute technical leadership and mentorship through design review, pairing, and PR review, raising the bar on idiomatic Go, dependency injected and interface first design, and table driven testing.
• Partner with adjacent teams on distributed systems concerns: CosmosDB data modeling and query performance, Kubernetes/Kustomize deployment configuration, Terraform provisioned Azure infrastructure, and service health/on call practices.
• Contribute to cross-org design discussions (security/IAM, identity and step up authentication, enterprise policy) and help drive open questions to a shipped, well tested outcome.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 6+ 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 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ 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 2+ 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

• OR equivalent experience.

• 3+ years of Go (or Ruby) experience.

• 3+ years of experience working in Azure, AWS, or GCP.

• 3+ years building and operating distributed backend systems, including API design, data modeling, and production ownership.

• 2+ years designing and evolving public or partner facing APIs, including versioning and backward compatibility tradeoffs.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $124,000.00 - USD $329,200.00 /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!