Staff Software Engineer, Enterprise AI Governance

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

GitHub is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Enterprise AI Governance team. Together with a distributed, diverse and passionate team of engineers and designers, you will build the platforms, services, and controls that help customers securely configure, govern, and operate Copilot experiences at scale. In this role you will design, prototype, implement, ship and support highly performant and inspiring systems with your team.

You will architect and build highly available, secure backend services and APIs that give customers fine-grained control and visibility over how Copilot is deployed across their organizations, from policy enforcement to auditing to configuration management. The ideal candidate has deep experience designing distributed systems that must balance security, compliance, and scale, and enjoys solving problems where trust and governance are first-class product requirements, not afterthoughts.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead technical direction across the Enterprise AI Governance team, setting the bar for system design, reliability, and operational excellence. You'll partner closely with product, security, and other Copilot platform teams to ensure governance capabilities scale alongside Copilot's rapid growth, while remaining simple and trustworthy for enterprise customers to adopt.

We are looking for creative problem solvers and diverse thinkers, people who care about culture as well as customers and features. We believe that how we do things is as important as what we do. Big vision, a common purpose, passion for quality, curiosity, dedication, and investment in fun and collaboration are what lead to great results. Great products reflect the teams that build them.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across GitHub services, staying intimately familiar with the systems you build and taking pride in maintainable code.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing, and code reviews that grow others and help teams produce extensible, maintainable code that integrates cleanly with downstream dependencies and meets quality standards.
• Own and advocate for the health and quality of the systems the team builds, including participating in on-call and first-responder rotations.
• Write architecture briefs and proposals, and run code experiments.
• Design and implement APIs that enable seamless integration between software components.
• Use CI/CD tools to build automated pipelines for continuous integration and delivery.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and stakeholders, leading discussions on technical solutions, including design and cost tradeoffs.
• Create and guide others in developing testing plans, defining success metrics, and integrating customer feedback, ensuring quality, reliability, and continuous improvement while meeting security and compliance standards.
• Maintain executional and operational excellence within and across teams and organizations.
• Use debugging tools and telemetry to validate assumptions, proactively resolve issues, and optimize code performance and maintainability.
• Drive and support a technical roadmap aligned with product goals, prioritizing engineering efforts and adopting new technologies and methodologies 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
  • 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.
• 2+ years experience in technical leadership roles such as technical lead, team lead or equivalent.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with modern front-end technologies (e.g., React, CSS, HTML, JavaScript/TypeScript) and design systems.
• 1+ years experience building agent-based experiences on top of large language modes (LLM's) including prompt engineering, tool use, and agentic workflow design.
• 2 + years experience using general purpose programming languages (e.g., Go, Ruby, or similar).
• Demonstrated experience with large-scale system architecture and design, particularly in cloud-based environments, with a strong understanding of distributed systems and microservices.
• Experience working closely with product management, design, and other engineering teams to drive cross-functional projects and deliver high-quality products

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!