Staff Research Engineer

GitHub Next has incubated genre-defining products like Copilot, Copilot Workspace, Spark, and Agentic Workflows, and is looking for experienced polymaths to explore the future of software development. Each exploration is a risky bet GitHub might want to make, supported by working prototypes that are taken to market to find evidence of product-market fit, informing GitHub's leadership and roadmap. This is not an academic research role: the job is to dream big about the future of software development and then build it, on a team that feels like a permanent startup and offers both startup-level agency and a larger company's resources.

Responsibilities

• Turn ambitious, loosely defined concepts into reliable prototypes, scoping bets wisely and delivering value quickly.
• Push AI capability limits, exploring what is almost possible today and anticipating what will be common soon.
• Operate as a generalist across many technologies, reading source code, picking up new stacks, and shaping the data, signals, and features needed to support evolving prototypes.
• Collaborate to determine what work needs doing, split responsibilities, and move projects forward, leveraging research approaches from across the team, organization, and industry rather than reinventing them.
• Act as a subject matter expert on the technical feasibility of AI ideas and opportunities across the organization.
• Assess feasibility, build small prototypes to prove viability, and engage in the end-to-end AI development lifecycle from research through product and maintenance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software development, applied science, machine learning, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience creating rapid prototypes that demonstrate a concept to stakeholders and enable decision making.
• Experience identifying and justifying research goals in situations of ambiguity and executing towards them without explicit direction.
• Preferred: significant experience with one of the many topics relevant to an interdisciplinary innovation group: frontend technologies (React, TypeScript), backend technologies (infra, datastores, devops, security), ML and AI (prompts, retrieval, agentic systems), programming languages, human-computer interaction, or distributed systems.
• Preferred: significant experience with open-source software, communities, and the systems these communities use to self-organize and ship software.
• Preferred: a deep understanding of GitHub's industry and business, especially as it is affected by AI.