Staff Software Engineer | GitHub | Remote United States
Job Description
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 Software Engineer to join the Copilot API team. This role focuses on maintaining and evolving a robust, scalable, and reliable platform that powers GitHub Copilot and its integrations. You will work on highly-available systems that manage the interaction of multiple large language models (LLMs), ensuring consistent, performant, and safe access at scale.
The ideal candidate has hands-on expertise in building and optimizing large-scale distributed systems, including tuning high-throughput services in production. You enjoy digging into technical details, improving resilience, and supporting smooth operation across services that must balance latency, cost, and reliability.
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Copilot API team, you will partner with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team of engineers and product managers across GitHub and other partners including AI frontier labs. The GitHub Copilot Platform underpins the quality, scale, and global availability of Copilot features. Your work will ensure its ongoing reliability, enabling seamless integration for other engineering teams and supporting developers worldwide.
You will contribute through strong technical implementation, thoughtful design decisions, and collaboration across teams. You’ll help uphold architectural standards, reinforce best practices for system performance, and identify opportunities to improve reliability and scale. Your contributions will directly shape the stability and growth of Copilot’s core infrastructure. We value developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration. At GitHub, curiosity and impact drive everything we build.
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.
- 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.
- Utilize CI/CD tools to set up automated pipelines for continuous integration and delivery.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams and partner with stakeholders and lead discussions for technical solutions, including design and cost considerations.
- Create and guide others in 1) developing clear testing plans to assure solution quality, reliability, and performance; 2) defining success metrics; and 3) integrating customer feedback for continuous improvement - all while ensuring system architecture meets security and compliance standards.
- 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.
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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java
- 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,
- 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,
- 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,
- 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, Go, Ruby, Rust, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java,
- OR equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Bash, Python, or a similar language), technologies and software platforms, (e.g., Go, Ruby, React,, 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.
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!
