Staff Software Engineer, AI Agents
GitHub · United Kingdom
About GitHubGitHub 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. The difference between a general-purpose agent and an expert is often whether it can find, understand, and apply the right context at the right time.
One of our goals is to make agents more effective and efficient by default, without requiring every developer or team to become an expert in configuring AI systems. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help ideate, develop, experiment, and build GitHub’s context layer that is part of our agent platform – this includes agent memory, search, GitHub graph, bringing the right context to agents efficiently and at the right time.
This work will help agents use the context available across code, issues, pull requests, workflows, connected developer tools, and much more. It will also contribute to agentic experiences that can learn from prior work, make higher-quality decisions, and carry useful context across tasks and product surfaces.
You'll be part of our Copilot Agents organization, working with a strong group of engineers and partnering across product, engineering, design, research, and data science. Your work can positively impact millions of developers and the AI agents helping them build everything from open-source projects 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, moving fast and learning quick. Great products reflect the teams that build them.
The ideal candidate has deep experience designing and building agent harnesses, evals, developer tools, context retrieval, and has worked on one or more of information retrieval, knowledge or context systems, developer platforms, or production generative-AI applications. You can move from ambiguous product problems to clear technical direction, build end-to-end systems, and help multiple teams make coherent architectural choices. You learn quickly, communicate clearly, and combine experimentation with operational rigor.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership for systems that help AI agents acquire, interpret, retain, and apply relevant software-development context.
- Design, prototype, implement, test, ship, and operate high-quality technical solutions that scale across GitHub services and Copilot experiences.
- Develop platform capabilities and APIs for context retrieval, sessions, memory, agent customization, evaluation, and feedback-driven improvement.
- Turn ambiguous customer and product opportunities into clear technical strategies, architecture proposals, experiments, and executable roadmaps.
- Work at the frontier of how software gets built with agents and evolve workflows that make the whole team faster.
- Partner with product managers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and engineers across GitHub to connect capabilities into coherent end-to-end experiences.
- Establish evaluation methods, telemetry, and learning loops that measure agent quality, efficiency, reliability, and customer outcomes.
- Make thoughtful tradeoffs across capability, latency, cost, privacy, security, reliability, and developer experience.
- Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems the team builds, including participating in first-responder on-call rotations and live incidents where applicable.
- Apply debugging tools, operational data, and structured experimentation to verify assumptions, identify bottlenecks, and improve system performance and maintainability.
- Provide mentorship, pairing opportunities, design and code reviews, and technical guidance that help engineers and teams grow.
- Help cultivate an inclusive environment where people are empowered, have clear ownership, and can do their best work.
- Drive executional and operational excellence within the team and influence engineering practices across organizational boundaries.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- 9+ 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 8+ 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 or related field AND 7+ 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 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 Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ 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 equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with information retrieval, context retrieval, knowledge graphs, semantic systems, personalization, or persistent knowledge and memory systems.
- Experience designing or integrating AI-agent or generative-AI features in production, including model orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, evaluation, or feedback loops.
- Experience defining technical direction and influencing architecture across multiple teams or organizations.
- Strong product and customer judgment, with a track record of turning ambiguous problems into simple, reliable, and maintainable systems.
- Experience with experimentation, telemetry, offline evaluation, and data-informed product development.
- Experience building systems with rigorous privacy, permission, security, provenance, or enterprise-governance requirements.
- Proficiency in one or more systems and/or application programming languages such as Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, TypeScript.
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!
- Provide technical leadership for systems that help AI agents acquire, interpret, retain, and apply relevant software-development context.
- Design, prototype, implement, test, ship, and operate high-quality technical solutions that scale across GitHub services and Copilot experiences.
- Develop platform capabilities and APIs for context retrieval, sessions, memory, agent customization, evaluation, and feedback-driven improvement.
- Turn ambiguous customer and product opportunities into clear technical strategies, architecture proposals, experiments, and executable roadmaps.
- Work at the frontier of how software gets built with agents and evolve workflows that make the whole team faster.
- Partner with product managers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and engineers across GitHub to connect capabilities into coherent end-to-end experiences.
- Establish evaluation methods, telemetry, and learning loops that measure agent quality, efficiency, reliability, and customer outcomes.
- Make thoughtful tradeoffs across capability, latency, cost, privacy, security, reliability, and developer experience.
- Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems the team builds, including participating in first-responder on-call rotations and live incidents where applicable.
- Apply debugging tools, operational data, and structured experimentation to verify assumptions, identify bottlenecks, and improve system performance and maintainability.
- Provide mentorship, pairing opportunities, design and code reviews, and technical guidance that help engineers and teams grow.
- Help cultivate an inclusive environment where people are empowered, have clear ownership, and can do their best work.
- Drive executional and operational excellence within the team and influence engineering practices across organizational boundaries.
Required Qualifications:
- 9+ 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 8+ 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 or related field AND 7+ 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 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 Doctorate in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ 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 equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with information retrieval, context retrieval, knowledge graphs, semantic systems, personalization, or persistent knowledge and memory systems.
- Experience designing or integrating AI-agent or generative-AI features in production, including model orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, evaluation, or feedback loops.
- Experience defining technical direction and influencing architecture across multiple teams or organizations.
- Strong product and customer judgment, with a track record of turning ambiguous problems into simple, reliable, and maintainable systems.
- Experience with experimentation, telemetry, offline evaluation, and data-informed product development.
- Experience building systems with rigorous privacy, permission, security, provenance, or enterprise-governance requirements.
- Proficiency in one or more systems and/or application programming languages such as Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, TypeScript.