Principal Engineering Manager, Copilot agent platform

GitHub, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 425,000; Full time

Job summary

GitHub, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer manager to lead the development of agentic experiences on the GitHub Cloud Agent platform.

You will guide a staff-level engineering team, translating product strategy into a clear technical roadmap and delivering secure, scalable, high-quality experiences for millions of developers and organizations. You will recruit, coach, and develop a high-performing team, champion ownership, inclusion, and collaboration, and partner with product, design,

Qualifications

• 11+ years in software engineering with production systems.
• Experience managing teams of staff and principal engineers.
• Strong distributed systems & AI/ML production experience.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical roadmap aligned with product goals.
• Shape GitHub's AI product portfolio and scale initiatives globally.
• Grow and mentor engineers, foster ownership and collaboration.
• Ensure incident response, reliability, and capacity planning.
• Foster telemetry-driven development and data-informed decisions.
• Identify bottlenecks in AI-powered workflows to improve impact.
• Drive engineering excellence through automation and standardization.
• Collaborate with product, design, security, and research teams.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

Mentoring

People management

AI/ML features

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Master's degree in CS

PhD in CS

Associate degree + 10+ years

Tools

Rust

Go

C/C++

Python

Job description

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 shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents. The GitHub Cloud Agent Platform provides the secure, scalable foundation for agents to autonomously perform complex software-development tasks at global scale. Our ambition is to reimagine the entire software development lifecycle for an agentic world, creating the platform and experiences that allow developers to delegate increasingly complex work to AI agents safely, seamlessly, and at scale.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer manager to lead the development of Agentic experiences. You'll be part of our Copilot Agents organization, positively impacting millions of software developers and AI agents around the world who are building everything from open source to global enterprises.

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.

You will lead a team responsible for creating innovative agentic experiences on the GitHub Cloud Agent platform and advancing how AI transforms the software development lifecycle. As a seasoned engineering manager, you will set the team’s direction in partnership with staff-level engineers, translate product strategy into a clear technical roadmap, and ensure the delivery of secure, scalable, and high-quality experiences for millions of developers and organizations.

You will recruit, coach, and develop a high-performing team, supporting engineers’ growth while fostering a culture of ownership, inclusion, collaboration, and engineering excellence. You will work closely with Product Management, Design, Research, Security, and engineering teams across GitHub to shape the product, navigate ambiguity, align priorities, and drive complex cross-functional initiatives from early ideas through successful customer adoption.

The ideal candidate has strategic vision, technical leadership in distributed systems, owning and managing large scale services and generative AI application architectures, as well as the ability to mentor very senior engineers, build empowered high-trust teams, and foster a culture of technical excellence, operational rigor, and experimentation. You will manage a team of staff and principal engineers and work closely with partner teams across the Copilot Agents organization.

Responsibilities

• Drive and execute technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring that engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new technologies and methodologies where applicable.

• Work with organizational leaders to shape GitHub’s AI product portfolio, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally.

• Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team's skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices.

• Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements. Oversee capacity planning to ensure performance, reliability, and compliance.

• Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data-informed decisions.

• Identify novel bottlenecks in AI-powered development workflows to improve team and organizational impact.

• Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations. Facilitate cross-team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services.

• Partner with stakeholders such as product managers and technical leads to determine requirements for services or complex scenarios, leveraging feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs.

Qualifications

Required Qualification:

• 11+ 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 10+ 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 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, 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 PhD 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 equivalent experience.

• 5+ years people management experience.
• 3+ years of building/managing large scale Services or building Agentic products.

Preferred Qualification:

• Experience building or operating large scale services.
• Expertise with systems programming languages — ideally Rust and Go.
• Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high-growth or ambiguous environments.
• Experience designing or integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems.

Compensation Range

The base salary range for this job is USD $160,200.00 - USD $425,000.00 /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!