Senior Software Engineer, Code Search

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.

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 collaborating 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.

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!