Principal Engineering Manager - Copilot agent platform

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents. The GitHub Cloud Agent Platform provides the secure, scalable foundation for agents to autonomously perform complex software-development tasks at global scale. Our ambition is to reimagine the entire software development lifecycle for an agentic world, creating the platform and experiences that allow developers to delegate increasingly complex work to AI agents safely, seamlessly, and at scale.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer manager to lead the development of Agentic experiences. 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.  

You will lead a team responsible for creating innovative agentic experiences on the GitHub Cloud Agent platform and advancing how AI transforms the software development lifecycle. As a seasoned engineering manager, you will set the team’s direction in partnership with staff-level engineers, translate product strategy into a clear technical roadmap, and ensure the delivery of secure, scalable, and high-quality experiences for millions of developers and organizations.

You will recruit, coach, and develop a high-performing team, supporting engineers’ growth while fostering a culture of ownership, inclusion, collaboration, and engineering excellence. You will work closely with Product Management, Design, Research, Security, and engineering teams across GitHub to shape the product, navigate ambiguity, align priorities, and drive complex cross-functional initiatives from early ideas through successful customer adoption.

The ideal candidate has strategic vision, technical leadership in distributed systems, owning and managing large scale services and generative AI application architectures, as well as the ability to mentor very senior engineers, build empowered high-trust teams, and foster a culture of technical excellence, operational rigor, and experimentation. You will manage a team of staff and principal engineers and work closely with partner teams across the Copilot Agents organization. 

• Drive and execute 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 organizational leaders to shape GitHub’s AI product portfolio, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally.

• Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team's skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices. 

• Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements. Oversee capacity planning to ensure performance, reliability, and compliance. 

• Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data-informed decisions. 

• Identify novel bottlenecks in AI-powered development workflows to improve team and organizational impact.

• Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations. Facilitate cross-team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services.  

• Partner with stakeholders such as product managers and technical leads to determine requirements for services or complex scenarios, leveraging feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs.