Staff Software Engineer, Copilot Code Review

Overview

AI writes code faster than teams can review it, and review is now the bottleneck. Getting an agent to review as well as, or better than, a great engineer who knows your codebase is one of the most important unsolved problems in AI-assisted development.

Copilot code review is GitHub's answer, and more developers get reviews from it than from any other AI reviewer, increasingly on code that agents wrote. Getting review right is hard to define and harder to measure, and no single number settles whether reviews got better. We think the AI products that win are the ones with the best evals, and we're building the best, offline and online.

We run at GitHub scale with an on-call rotation, and we're a fast-growing team competing to build the best AI code reviewer in the world.

As a Staff Software Engineer here, you'll take the problems nobody has answered yet and ship the answer: when a review should stay quiet, or what the agent should learn about a codebase instead of being told. You won't be handed a spec. Other engineers will follow the calls you make, but you lead by building, not by writing the plan.

Responsibilities

Own product problems that arrive without an answer and ship the answer end to end.
Advance how the agent reviews: the context it uses, what it remembers, and how it improves over time.
Decide what a good review looks like for a class of code, then build the evals that hold the product to it.
Make the quality, latency, and cost tradeoffs that decide how deep a review goes.
Improve review quality in aggregate and quantify the gain, including when a change wins overall and loses on some pull requests.
Shape the end-to-end review experience across VS Code, the GitHub Copilot app, and the GitHub Copilot CLI, and pull requests.
Keep a high-throughput service healthy at GitHub scale, including an on-call rotation.
Work at the frontier of how software gets built with agents and evolve workflows that make the whole team faster.

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

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.

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.

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.

OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

Hands-on experience pushing coding agents to their limits, with a view on where they should and shouldn't own engineering work.

Experience owning the measurement that makes a model-driven product improvable and catching metrics that move for the wrong reason.

Depth in Go, Ruby, TypeScript, or Python, with the operational experience of running a distributed service on call at GitHub scale.

Experience shipping an LLM-backed or agentic product, or the eval infrastructure behind one.