Staff Software Engineer, Code Search

GitHub is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to develop, scale, operate, and extend Blackbird, its lexical and semantic code search engine. The role focuses on building scalable code search technology and integrating it with AI agents and AI-powered software development workflows.

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
• Help cultivate an environment where team members are empowered and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and belonging
• 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
• Maintain executional and operational excellence within and potentially across teams/organizations
• Apply debugging tools and telemetry to verify assumptions, proactively resolve issues, and optimize code performance and maintainability
• Drive and support 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 the team to understand technical constraints, and develop, communicate, and track against realistic plans to consistently ship products, features, and bug fixes

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 building or operating web-scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems
• Expertise with systems programming languages — ideally Rust
• Experience designing or integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems
• Prior experience solving problems with large-scale, distributed systems is preferred