IT & Software

Staff Software Engineer, Code Search

GitHub

Remote · Nationwide · United Kingdom

Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will help design, scale, and operate Blackbird, GitHub’s high-performance lexical and semantic code search engine, and drive AI-powered development workflows. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams across Copilot Agents to deliver scalable search capabilities used by millions of developers. You’ll lead technical direction, mentor peers, and own the health and quality of complex systems. This role offers impact at scale, shaping how developers navigate code and work with AI-assisted tools.

Pay / Benefits
  • competitive pay
  • generous learning and growth opportunities
  • excellent benefits
  • remote-first work
  • flexible work arrangements? (implied)
Responsibilities
  • Design, develop, test and ship scalable code across GitHub services with maintainable architecture
  • Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and code reviews to grow the team
  • Foster ownership and inclusivity within the team
  • Own system health, participate in on-call rotations and incident response
  • Write architecture briefs and run code experiments
  • Design and implement APIs for component integration
  • Maintain operational excellence across teams and services
  • Apply debugging tools and telemetry to validate assumptions and optimize performance
  • Shape and execute the technical roadmap aligned with product goals
  • Collaborate with teams to plan and ship features and fixes
Key requirements
  • 9+ years in Software Engineering with production software delivery; proficiency in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
  • Alternative: Associate’s Degree plus 8+ years of experience with the same language set
  • Alternative: Bachelor's Degree plus 7+ years with the same language set
  • Alternative: Master's Degree plus 5+ years with the same language set
  • Alternative: Doctorate plus 3+ years with the same language set
  • Equivalent experience acceptable
  • autonomy and quick learning
  • strong communication and ability to set technical direction
  • problem solving and analytical thinking
  • distributed systems
  • search at scale
  • reliability engineering

Reference: WJ-747_30138488

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