Staff Software Engineer

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 GitHub is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Copilot API team. This role is focused on shaping and building a robust, scalable, and reliable platform that powers GitHub Copilot and its integrations. You will lead the design and evolution of highly available backend services and APIs, ensuring consistent, performant, and safe access at global scale.

The ideal candidate has deep experience building and operating distributed systems in production and is energized by system behaviour, reliability, performance, and cost at scale. As a staff-level engineer, you will set technical direction, raise the bar on engineering quality, and drive improvements across service health (SLOs/SLIs), incident response, observability, and capacity planning.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Copilot API team, you will partner with engineering, product, and partner teams across GitHub to align platform capabilities with product needs and integration patterns. The Copilot API platform underpins the reliability and scalability of Copilot features used by developers worldwide; you will help other teams move faster by providing clear platform interfaces, pragmatic guidance, and scalable architectural patterns.

You will contribute through hands-on implementation of critical paths, thoughtful architecture and design reviews, and strong collaboration within and beyond your team. You’ll identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve resilience and scalability, de-risk ambiguous technical work, and translate product goals into durable platform investments. We value developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration, and we believe curiosity, operational rigor, and long-term impact drive great engineering at GitHub.

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 Required 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 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 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 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, 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 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., Ruby, React, Go, 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!