[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @GitHub

Role Description

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help ideate, develop, experiment, and build GitHub’s context layer that is part of our agent platform. This includes:

• Agent memory
• Search
• GitHub graph
• Bringing the right context to agents efficiently and at the right time

This work will help agents use the context available across:

• Code
• Issues
• Pull requests
• Workflows
• Connected developer tools
• And much more

You will be part of our Copilot Agents organization, working with a strong group of engineers and partnering across product, engineering, design, research, and data science. Your work can positively impact millions of developers and the AI agents helping them build everything from open-source projects to global enterprises.

We are looking for creative problem solvers and diverse thinkers who care about culture as well as customers and features. We believe that how we do things is as important as what we do.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for systems that help AI agents acquire, interpret, retain, and apply relevant software-development context.
• Design, prototype, implement, test, ship, and operate high-quality technical solutions that scale across GitHub services and Copilot experiences.
• Develop platform capabilities and APIs for context retrieval, sessions, memory, agent customization, evaluation, and feedback-driven improvement.
• Turn ambiguous customer and product opportunities into clear technical strategies, architecture proposals, experiments, and executable roadmaps.
• Work at the frontier of how software gets built with agents and evolve workflows that make the whole team faster.
• Partner with product managers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and engineers across GitHub to connect capabilities into coherent end-to-end experiences.
• Establish evaluation methods, telemetry, and learning loops that measure agent quality, efficiency, reliability, and customer outcomes.
• Make thoughtful tradeoffs across capability, latency, cost, privacy, security, reliability, and developer experience.
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems the team builds, including participating in first-responder on-call rotations and live incidents where applicable.
• Apply debugging tools, operational data, and structured experimentation to verify assumptions, identify bottlenecks, and improve system performance and maintainability.
• Provide mentorship, pairing opportunities, design and code reviews, and technical guidance that help engineers and teams grow.
• Help cultivate an inclusive environment where people are empowered, have clear ownership, and can do their best work.
• Drive executional and operational excellence within the team and influence engineering practices across organizational boundaries.

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.
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 7+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline.
• 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.
• 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.
• OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with information retrieval, context retrieval, knowledge graphs, semantic systems, personalization, or persistent knowledge and memory systems.
• Experience designing or integrating AI-agent or generative-AI features in production, including model orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, evaluation, or feedback loops.
• Experience defining technical direction and influencing architecture across multiple teams or organizations.
• Strong product and customer judgment, with a track record of turning ambiguous problems into simple, reliable, and maintainable systems.
• Experience with experimentation, telemetry, offline evaluation, and data-informed product development.
• Experience building systems with rigorous privacy, permission, security, provenance, or enterprise-governance requirements.
• Proficiency in one or more systems and/or application programming languages such as Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, TypeScript.

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.

This position will be open for a minimum of 3 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.