Staff Software Engineer

About GitHub

GitHub 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 States

Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Code and Review team, you will shape the pull request and code review experience used by over 100 million developers. Pull requests are the beating heart of collaboration on GitHub — where ideas become code, feedback drives quality, and teams ship with confidence.

You will design, build, and evolve the systems behind pull request creation, code review, the Files Changed experience, and the automation and integration workflows that power modern development. We’re looking for engineers who combine deep technical skill with product empathy — people who care about craft and understand that great developer tools reflect the teams that build them.

Agent-driven software development is changing how code is written, reviewed, and shipped. As AI agents become first-class participants in the development lifecycle, the pull request experience must evolve to support new collaboration patterns between humans and machines. You’ll help define what that future looks like.

This is a fully remote role. Our distributed team values async communication, deep work, and trust-based collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and ship high-quality solutions that scale across GitHub’s services, with a focus on the pull request and code review workflow. Take pride in writing maintainable code and becoming deeply familiar with the systems you build.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and code reviews that elevate the team; support others in producing extensible, maintainable code that integrates cleanly with downstream dependencies.
• Own the health and quality of the systems the team builds, including participating in on-call rotations and live incident response.
• Contribute across the full pull request product surface — PR creation, code review, merge workflows, and the Files Changed experience — owning features end-to-end from design through delivery.
• Help evolve the code review and merge experience to support agent-driven development, where AI-authored code must be reviewed, validated, and shipped with the same rigor as human-authored contributions.
• Write architecture briefs and proposals; carry out code experiments to validate approaches for improving the pull request experience.
• Collaborate with product, design, and platform engineering to lead technical discussions, including design trade-offs and cost considerations.
• Guide teams in developing testing strategies, defining success metrics, and integrating customer feedback — while ensuring architecture meets security and compliance standards.
• Drive the technical roadmap for pull requests and code review, ensuring engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporate new technologies where applicable.

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

• o 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

• o 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.

• o 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.

• o OR equivalent experience.

• Experience building and operating large-scale web applications serving millions of users, with a focus on reliability, performance, and iterative delivery.

• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives from problem definition through shipping and iteration.

• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across a team or organization.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript, or Go in production, and comfort working full-stack from database to browser.
• Deep familiarity with Git internals, diff algorithms, or code review tooling — as a contributor or a power user who understands the domain deeply.
• Experience building developer tools, productivity platforms, or collaboration software where user empathy and workflow design are critical.
• Experience in large-scale monolith codebases with a track record of incremental modernization that balances stability with velocity.
• Interest in or experience with AI-assisted development workflows — how LLMs and autonomous agents are changing code authorship, review, and the SDLC.
• Passion for developer experience — you’ve contributed to open source, shaped internal tooling, or built products that make other engineers more effective.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $140,400.00 - USD $372,300.00 /Yr.

These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role.

This position will be open for a minimum of 3 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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.

EEO Statement

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!