Senior Software Engineer, Code Search

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.

Overview: Senior Software Engineer, Code Search

As a Senior Software Engineer, Code Search at GitHub, you will enhance the collaboration experience by working closely with a distributed, diverse, and passionate team. You will be instrumental in delivering services that millions of developers depend on. This role involves designing, prototyping, implementing, shipping, and supporting highly performant and globally scalable code search technology.

We seek creative problem solvers and diverse thinkers who value culture, customers, and features. We believe in the importance of how we achieve our goals, emphasizing big vision, common purpose, passion for quality, curiosity, dedication, fun, and collaboration.

GitHub hosts more development data than anywhere else, making understanding and navigating this data a core mission area with significant unrealized potential. We have high aspirations for how we can help developers understand and navigate code, making collaboration more seamless. The foundation for these efforts is our purpose-built code search engine, which powers lexical and semantic code search in GitHub’s core experience and Copilot products.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and ship high-quality technical solutions that scale across multiple GitHub services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and implement innovative solutions.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, pairing opportunities, and code reviews to encourage the growth of others.
• 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, carry out code experiments, and build prototypes to learn how we can achieve planetary scale with our systems.
• Design and implement APIs to facilitate seamless integration between software components.
• Utilize CI/CD tools to set up automated pipelines for continuous integration and delivery.
• Become intimately familiar with the systems you build and take pride in writing maintainable code.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• 6+ 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 a 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
• Bachelor's Degree in a related field AND 4+ 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 a related field AND 2+ 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 a related field. OR
• Equivalent experience.
• 6+ years experience designing, building, scaling, and maintaining large-scale distributed systems (user base of 100 million+).

Preferred Qualifications:

• 2+ years experience in systems programming, search index internals, and information retrieval.
• 4+ years experience designing and implementing data structures and algorithms.
• Experience effectively contributing to technical strategy and roadmaps with strong customer focus and data-driven approach.
• Passionate about fostering good engineering practices and processes with solid understanding of testing principles and high-quality software.
• Understanding of production system monitoring and observability across network, application, caching, queuing, load-balancing, storage, and distributed services layers.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $124,000.00 - USD $329,200.00 /Yr. These pay ranges cover roles across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. At GitHub, certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock, allocated based on individual impact. Some roles also offer sales incentives based on revenue or utilization.

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 home to the biggest open-source community on earth, with 99% of the world’s software having open-source code in its DNA. Many everyday apps and programs are built on GitHub.

Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading in AI, driving humanitarian efforts, and even sending open source to Mars. At GitHub, we aim to create the space you need to do your best work. We are remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know people flourish when they work on their own terms.

Join us, and let’s change the world, together.

EEO Statement

GitHub embraces diversity and invites applications from people of all backgrounds. We do not discriminate based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. We are happy to accommodate individuals with disabilities during the interview process; please let us know how we can assist you.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Code Search Technology
• Information Retrieval
• Scalable Solutions
• API Design
• Data Structures & Algorithms
• CI/CD
• Technical Leadership
• System Monitoring
• Production Software Development