Staff Software Engineer, GitHub Intelligence (Copilot Agents)

GitHub is a leading AI-powered developer platform focused on agentic software development through GitHub Copilot. The Staff Software Engineer will build the context layer for Copilot Agents, including memory, search, GitHub graph, and context retrieval systems. The role involves providing technical leadership, developing scalable platform capabilities, partnering across disciplines, and improving the quality, reliability, and efficiency of AI agents.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership for systems that help AI agents acquire, interpret, retain, and apply relevant software-development context
• Design, prototype, implement, test, ship, and operate high-quality technical solutions that scale across GitHub services and Copilot experiences
• Develop platform capabilities and APIs for context retrieval, sessions, memory, agent customization, evaluation, and feedback-driven improvement
• Turn ambiguous customer and product opportunities into clear technical strategies, architecture proposals, experiments, and executable roadmaps
• Work at the frontier of how software gets built with agents and evolve workflows that make the whole team faster
• Partner with product managers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and engineers across GitHub to connect capabilities into coherent end-to-end experiences
• Establish evaluation methods, telemetry, and learning loops that measure agent quality, efficiency, reliability, and customer outcomes
• Make thoughtful tradeoffs across capability, latency, cost, privacy, security, reliability, and developer experience
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems the team builds, including participating in first-responder on-call rotations and live incidents where applicable
• Apply debugging tools, operational data, and structured experimentation to verify assumptions, identify bottlenecks, and improve system performance and maintainability
• Provide mentorship, pairing opportunities, design and code reviews, and technical guidance that help engineers and teams grow
• Help cultivate an inclusive environment where people are empowered, have clear ownership, and can do their best work
• Drive executional and operational excellence within the team and influence engineering practices across organizational boundaries

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 with information retrieval, context retrieval, knowledge graphs, semantic systems, personalization, or persistent knowledge and memory systems
• Experience designing or integrating AI-agent or generative-AI features in production, including model orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, evaluation, or feedback loops
• Experience defining technical direction and influencing architecture across multiple teams or organizations
• Strong product and customer judgment, with a track record of turning ambiguous problems into simple, reliable, and maintainable systems
• Experience with experimentation, telemetry, offline evaluation, and data-informed product development
• Experience building systems with rigorous privacy, permission, security, provenance, or enterprise-governance requirements
• Proficiency in one or more systems and/or application programming languages such as Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, TypeScript