Principal Software Engineering Manager

GitHub is looking for a Principal Engineering Manager to lead the development of Blackbird, its lexical and semantic code search engine. Blackbird powers context retrieval for business-critical experiences across the platform and Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code. You will manage a team of staff and principal engineers within the Copilot Agents organization, bringing strategic vision, technical leadership in distributed systems and generative AI architectures, and the ability to build empowered, high-trust teams with a culture of technical excellence, operational rigor, and experimentation.

Responsibilities

• Drive and execute a technical roadmap aligned with product goals, strategically prioritizing engineering efforts and adopting new technologies where applicable.
• Work with organizational leaders to shape GitHub's AI product portfolio, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally.
• Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and keep the team's skills current with industry developments.
• Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements, and oversee capacity planning for performance, reliability, and compliance.
• Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data-informed decisions.
• Identify novel bottlenecks in AI-powered development workflows to improve team and organizational impact.
• Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations.
• Facilitate cross-team communication, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts, partnering with product managers and technical leads on requirements for complex scenarios.

Qualifications

• 11+ years of experience in software engineering with proven delivery of production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python (less with a relevant degree, or equivalent experience).
• 5+ years of people management experience, including mentoring very senior engineers.
• Preferred: experience building or operating web-scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems.
• Preferred: expertise with systems programming languages, ideally Rust, and experience integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems.
• Preferred: a proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high-growth or ambiguous environments.