Job Description
GitHub is looking for a Principal Software Engineer focused on backend large scale service design, execution & operations to join the Copilot API team. This role is focused on shaping and building a robust, scalable, and reliable platform that powers GitHub Copilot and its integrations. You will lead the design and evolution of highly available backend services and APIs, ensuring consistent, performant, and safe access at global scale. The ideal candidate has deep experience building and operating distributed systems in production and is energized by system behaviour, reliability, performance, and cost at scale. You will set technical direction, raise the bar on engineering quality, and drive improvements across service health (SLOs/SLIs), incident response, observability, and capacity planning. As a Principal Software Engineer on the Copilot API team, you will partner with engineering, product, and partner teams across GitHub to align platform capabilities with product needs and integration patterns. The Copilot API platform underpins the reliability and scalability of Copilot features used by developers worldwide; you will help other teams move faster by providing clear platform interfaces, pragmatic guidance, and scalable architectural patterns. You will contribute through hands-on implementation of critical paths, thoughtful architecture and design reviews, and strong collaboration within and beyond your team. You’ll identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve resilience and scalability, de-risk ambiguous technical work, and translate product goals into durable platform investments. We value developer empathy, transparency, and inclusive collaboration, and we believe curiosity, operational rigor, and long-term impact drive great engineering at GitHub.
