Software Engineer II

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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 Copilot has changed the way software is built, and we have a unique opportunity to look further ahead to identify how software development can be faster, safer, easier, and more accessible. We’re looking for a talented and experienced Software Engineer to join us in this mission! GitHub Copilot Agent Services owns the platform that expands Copilot's abilities with powerful AI agents in a rich ecosystem of developer tools and services as part of our industry-leading experiences.

As a Software Engineer on the Copilot Agent Services Team, you will work closely with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team of engineers and product managers with multiple teams across GitHub and Microsoft to improve and maintain our platform that integrators depend on in their software development cycle. Together, we are dedicated to shaping the future of software development by continuously enhancing AI-powered capabilities in GitHub and beyond. The Copilot team is highly distributed and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication. You’re expected to have strong written communication skills and be able to develop working relationships with coworkers in locations around the globe. As an engineer at GitHub you’ll always be challenged to solve interesting and novel problems that have real impact on how the world builds software.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and implement innovative solutions.
• Contribute to the development of technical solutions for products or features within the team’s area of responsibility.
• Work under the guidance of senior technical leaders to test design hypotheses, refine implementation approaches, and support code planning activities.
• Develop and maintain code to validate technical concepts and assist with broader technical validation efforts.
• Participate in the creation and review of design documents for simple solutions or User Stories, with appropriate oversight.
• Help identify suitable technologies and understand how system components interact within the overall architecture.
• Conduct investigations into technical issues or design options and escalate findings to team members to inform design and implementation decisions.
• Continually develop knowledge of system architecture considerations, including the implications of security, privacy, and compliance requirements, and apply this understanding to day-to-day development activities.
• Draft proposed plans for the availability and scalability of features and changes in production with consideration for server health.
• Utilize CI/CD tools to set up automated pipelines for continuous integration and delivery.
• Monitor the health of the services to make data-driven projections on scalability and develop a rollback plan.
• Learn about and contribute to operations of live service as issues arise on a rotational, on-call basis.
• Identify solutions and mitigations to simple issues impacting performance or functionality of Live Site services and escalate, as necessary.
• Begin to monitor existing, examine reported signals, file reports for escalation as needed, and mitigate issues impacting system health.
• Review, maintain, and evaluate scorecards to determine if scores are met to measure service health, with detailed guidance from the team.
• Act upon improvement areas within the scorecard to meet expected metrics.
• Act as a First Responder in monitoring system/product feature/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions for simple problems, and recommend actions to restore system/product/service by following the playbook.
• Escalate more complex problems to First Responders as to status.
• Respond within Service Level Objectives (SLO) timeframe.
• Escalate issues to appropriate owners.
• Monitor alerts, investigate issues, and resolve issues. Escalate for resolution if needed.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 2+ years experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
• Associate’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 1+ year(s) experience.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field. Equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Professional experience coding in Go, JavaScript, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
• Interest or prior experience in modern AI/machine learning technologies, Large Language Models or similar.
• Experience with distributed systems at global scale.
• Experience working with a remote, distributed team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Passionate about fostering good API Design practices and processes.

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

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!