Senior 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 Senior Software Engineer to help develop, scale, operate and extend Blackbird. This role is specifically focused on infrastructure, operations, automation, CI/CD, DX, observability, and security. 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, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, reliability engineering, 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

• 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. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications: 

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• 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. 
• 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!