Staff Software Engineer - Code Search

About GitHub

GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development — powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 180 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate, and more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.

Locations

In this role you can work from Remote, United Kingdom

Overview

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents — and search is at the heart of it. 

As GitHub's lexical and semantic code search engine, Blackbird powers context retrieval for business-critical 

experiences across the platform and our Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code. 

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help develop, scale, operate and extend Blackbird including integrating with AI Agents and developing new AI-powered software development workflows. You'll be part of our Copilot Agents organization, positively impacting millions of software developers and AI agents around the world who are building everything from open source to global enterprises. 

We are looking for creative problem solvers and diverse thinkers, people who care about culture as well as customers and features. We believe that how we do things is as important as what we do. Big vision, a common purpose, passion for quality, curiosity, dedication, and investment in fun and collaboration are what lead to great results. Great products reflect the teams that build them.  

More of the world’s development data lives on GitHub than anywhere else. Helping developers navigate and understand that data is a core part of GitHub’s mission, and an area with significant potential we have only begun to realize. We have high aspirations for how we can help developers understand and navigate code, and for making collaboration more seamless. The foundation for these efforts is our purpose-built code search engine which powers lexical and semantic code search in GitHub’s core search experience as well as GitHub’s Copilot products. 

The ideal candidate has strong experience with distributed systems, search at scale, reliability engineering, and/or generative AI application architectures, as well as the ability to work autonomously, learn quickly, and communicate and set technical direction. You will be working within a strong team of staff and principal engineers as well as collaborate with partner teams across the Copilot Agents organization. 

As a software engineer at GitHub, you will enhance the collaboration experience at GitHub by working closely with a community of engineers and designers with a distributed, diverse and passionate team delivering the services that millions of developers depend on. In this role you will design, prototype, implement, ship and support highly performant and globally scalable code search technology with your team.

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.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications: 

• 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. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• 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.

GitHub values

• Customer-obsessed
• Ship to learn
• Growth mindset
• Own the outcome
• Better together
• Diverse and inclusive

Manager fundamentals

• Model
• Coach
• Care

Leadership principles

• Create clarity
• Generate energy
• Deliver success

Who We Are

GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 million developers and counting. We’re also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world’s software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.
Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We’re remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.
Join us, and let’s change the world, together.

Equal Employment Opportunity

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!