Staff Software Engineer, Code Search

GitHub, Inc.•UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

11h•Remote

About The Position

GitHub is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Blackbird lexical and semantic code search engine, which supports core GitHub search and Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code. The role is part of the Copilot Agents organization and focuses on developing, scaling, operating, and extending code search, integrating it with AI agents, and building AI-powered software development workflows. The engineer will work with staff and principal engineers and partner teams to design, prototype, implement, ship, and support performant, globally scalable code search technology. The role includes technical leadership, system ownership, roadmap work, and supporting production services.

Requirements

At least 9 years of experience in software engineering, computer science, or a related technical discipline, with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in one or more languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python; or equivalent experience.
Alternatively, an associate degree in a listed or related technical field and at least 8 years of relevant experience; a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field and at least 7 years; a master's degree in a listed or related technical field and at least 5 years; or a doctorate in a listed or related technical field and at least 3 years.
Ability to work autonomously, learn quickly, communicate, and set technical direction.
Strong experience in distributed systems, search at scale, reliability engineering, and/or generative AI application architectures.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across GitHub services, while maintaining familiarity with systems and writing maintainable code.
Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing, and code reviews; help teams produce extensible and maintainable code and meet integration and quality standards.
Help create an environment where team members feel empowered and a sense of ownership and belonging.
Own and advocate for the health and quality of team systems, including participating in on-call first-responder rotations and live incidents.
Write architecture briefs and proposals and conduct code experiments.
Design and implement APIs that enable seamless integration between software components.
Maintain executional and operational excellence within and potentially across teams or organizations.
Use debugging tools and telemetry to verify assumptions, resolve issues proactively, and optimize performance and maintainability.
Drive and support a technical roadmap aligned with product goals, prioritizing engineering efforts and adopting new technologies and methodologies where applicable.
Work with the team to understand technical constraints and develop, communicate, and track realistic plans for shipping products, features, and bug fixes.