Senior Software Engineer, Code Search

GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform, powering software development and collaboration for millions of developers and organizations. The Senior Software Engineer will develop, scale, operate, and extend the Blackbird lexical and semantic code search engine, with a focus on infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, developer experience, observability, security, and globally scalable systems. The role also involves designing APIs, supporting production services, participating in on-call rotations, and collaborating with engineering teams across the Copilot Agents organization.

Responsibilities:

• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems that the team builds, including participating in on-call and first responder rotations
• Drives efforts to collect, classify, and analyze data on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring)
• Drives the refinement of products through data analytics, and makes informed decisions in engineering products through data integration
• Considers and drives comprehensive application of automation within production and deployment of a product
• Runs code in simulated or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime for products
• Improves development quality, development velocity, and team performance through modeling contributions to improvement of developer tooling
• Drives efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility
• Creates and ensures the presence of visible evidence (e.g., audit logs, system reports, security compliance) to demonstrate compliance for products
• Leverages subject-matter expertise of product features, incorporates service health indicators (e.g., SLOs) to prioritize work focused on, and partners with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) to drive collaboration on the workgroup's project plans, release plans, and work items
• Write architecture briefs and proposals, carry out code experiments, and build prototypes to learn how we can achieve planetary scale with our systems
• 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
• Become intimately familiar with the systems you build and take pride in writing maintainable code
• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services

Requirements:

• 6+ 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 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 Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ 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 2+ 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
  • OR equivalent experience
• Understanding of production system monitoring and observability with skills across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage and distributed services layers
• Passionate about fostering good engineering practices and processes with solid understanding of testing principles and high-quality software
• 2+ years experience in systems programming, search index internals and information retrieval