[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer, Code Search @GitHub, Inc.

Role Description

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents — and search is at the heart of it. As GitHub's lexical and semantic code search engine, Blackbird powers context retrieval for business-critical experiences across the platform and our Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help develop, scale, operate and extend Blackbird including integrating with AI Agents and developing new AI-powered software development workflows. You'll be part of our Copilot Agents organization, positively impacting millions of software developers and AI agents around the world who are building everything from open source to global enterprises.

As a software engineer at GitHub, you will enhance the collaboration experience by working closely with a community of engineers and designers with a distributed, diverse and passionate team delivering the services that millions of developers depend on. In this role you will:

• Design, prototype, implement, ship and support highly performant and globally scalable code search technology.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others.
• 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.
• 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.
• Work with the team to understand technical constraints and develop, communicate, and track against realistic plans.

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 building or operating web-scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems.
• Expertise with systems programming languages — ideally Rust.
• Experience designing or integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems.

GitHub Values

• Customer-obsessed
• Ship to learn
• Growth mindset
• Own the outcome
• Better together
• Diverse and inclusive