Principal Software Engineering Manager

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development, and they are seeking a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead the development of Blackbird, their code search engine. This role involves driving technical roadmaps, managing engineering teams, and fostering a culture of innovation and excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Drive and execute 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
• Work with organizational leaders to shape GitHub’s AI product portfolio, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally
• Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team's skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices
• Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements. Oversee capacity planning to ensure performance, reliability, and compliance
• Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data-informed decisions
• Identify novel bottlenecks in AI-powered development workflows to improve team and organizational impact
• Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations. Facilitate cross-team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services
• Partner with stakeholders such as product managers and technical leads to determine requirements for services or complex scenarios, leveraging feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs

Requirements:

• 11+ 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 10+ 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 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 Master'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 PhD 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 equivalent experience
• 5+ years people management experience
• Experience building or operating web-scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems
• Expertise with systems programming languages — ideally Rust
• Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high-growth or ambiguous environments
• Experience designing or integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems