About the role

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents, and search is at the heart of it. Blackbird, GitHub's lexical and semantic code search engine, powers context retrieval for business-critical experiences across the platform and Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code. As a Staff Software Engineer in the Copilot Agents organization, you will help develop, scale, operate, and extend Blackbird, including integrating with AI agents and building new AI-powered development workflows, impacting millions of developers worldwide.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, and ship high-quality, globally scalable code search technology across multiple GitHub services.
Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others across a strong team of staff and principal engineers.
Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems the team builds, participating in on-call first responder rotations and live incidents.
Write architecture briefs and proposals and carry out code experiments.
Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
Apply debugging tools and telemetry to verify assumptions, proactively resolve issues, and optimize performance.
Drive a technical roadmap aligned with product goals, incorporating new technologies and methodologies where applicable.
Work with the team to understand technical constraints and develop, communicate, and track realistic plans to consistently ship products, features, and bug fixes.

Qualifications

9+ years of software engineering experience delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python (less with a relevant degree, or equivalent experience).
Strong experience with distributed systems, search at scale, reliability engineering, and/or generative AI application architectures.
Ability to work autonomously, learn quickly, and set technical direction while communicating clearly across teams.
Preferred: experience building or operating web-scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems.
Preferred: expertise with systems programming languages, ideally Rust.
Preferred: experience designing or integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems.

Skills

Backend Rust AI LLMs Distributed Systems Search

How to apply

Apply directly on the employer's application page. Your application goes straight to them.

Republished listing

This opportunity was discovered on GitHub's public careers page and is republished here for discovery purposes. Applications are handled by the employer.

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