Staff Software Engineer

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development, powered by Copilot and used by developers and organizations worldwide. The Staff Software Engineer will design, build, and operate foundational Sessions and Tasks APIs and agent platform capabilities, while providing technical leadership across distributed systems, API design, security, infrastructure, and cross-team initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate the Sessions and Tasks APIs (Go, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Blob Storage, Event Hubs) that back every Copilot agent surface: Copilot Coding Agent, Copilot CLI, VS Code Chat, JetBrains Chat, and Copilot Chat on github.com
• Own and evolve the agent registry and remote steering model, including the policies that decide who can create, edit, or remotely control a session (org/enterprise settings, MDM host managed settings, SSO organization requirements, and staff/internal bypass rules)
• Drive spec first API design: propose changes to the OpenAPI description, regenerate strict server bindings, and coordinate breaking or additive schema changes across client and platform teams (copilot-agent-runtime, sweagentd, copilot-api, the github/github monolith, and github-ui)
• Write architecture decision records and design proposals for new platform capabilities (for example: the Agent Host Protocol for user managed and sandboxed environments, token sealing and minting for secure relay, and unified steering across synchronous and asynchronous agents)
• Ship safely at scale using staged, feature flag gated rollouts (observe-then-enforce patterns) across dotcom, GHES, and Proxima tenants
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship through design review, pairing, and PR review, raising the bar on idiomatic Go, dependency injected and interface first design, and table driven testing
• Partner with adjacent teams on distributed systems concerns: CosmosDB data modeling and query performance, Kubernetes/Kustomize deployment configuration, Terraform provisioned Azure infrastructure, and service health/on call practices
• Represent Mission Control in cross-org design discussions (security/IAM, identity and step up authentication, enterprise policy) and help drive open questions to a shipped, well tested outcome

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
• 5+ years of experience operating distributed backend systems at a senior level, including API design, data modeling, and production ownership
• 3+ years demonstrated experience designing and evolving public or partner facing APIs, including versioning and backward compatibility tradeoffs
• Hands on experience with Go in production, ideally on multi-tenant, high availability services
• Experience with NoSQL or document databases (Azure CosmosDB or comparable) and event driven architectures (Event Hubs, Kafka, or similar)
• Experience with spec first API development (OpenAPI/Swagger) and generated server/client bindings
• Experience with feature flag driven development and staged, reversible rollouts in a service used across multiple regions or tenancy models (for example, standard SaaS plus government/sovereign cloud style deployments)
• Familiarity with Kubernetes/Kustomize based deployment and Terraform managed cloud infrastructure