Staff Software Engineer, Copilot Agents

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development. In this role, you will help shape the future of agentic software development as a Staff Software Engineer on the Copilot Agents team, partnering with engineers, researchers, and designers to deliver experiences that millions of developers rely on every day.

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
• Build and use agentic tooling to accelerate your own and your team’s impact
• 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
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and partner with stakeholders and lead discussions for technical solutions, including design and cost considerations
• Maintain executional and operational excellence within and potentially across teams/organizations
• Drive and support the technical roadmap for Copilot Agents that aligns with product goals, ensuring engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new model capabilities, agent frameworks, and methodologies as the AI landscape evolves
• Architect and evolve agentic coding systems that orchestrates LLM tool use, planning loops, sandboxed code execution, and long-horizon task completion across GitHub repositories, issues, pull requests, and Actions
• Champion responsible AI practices for autonomous coding agents, including prompt-injection defenses, permission scoping, audit logging, and human-in-the-loop review patterns that keep developers in control of changes Copilot makes on their behalf

Requirements:

• 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 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, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
• OR equivalent experience
• 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 dashboards (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
• Hands-on experience building agentic systems – multi-step planning loops, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation, sandboxed code execution, or autonomous task completion – on top of frontier LLMs (e.g., Claude, GPT-4/5-class models)
• Experience with evaluation methodologies for non-deterministic AI systems, including offline benchmarks, online A/B experiments, and human-in-the-loop quality measurement
• Familiarity with the GitHub developer platform – repositories, pull requests, Actions, Issues, and the GitHub REST/GraphQL APIs – and a passion for the developer experience
• Awareness of AI safety and security concerns specific to coding agents, including prompt injection, sandbox escape, secret leakage, and supply-chain risk, with a track record of designing mitigations