Staff Software Engineer

Description

Core Tech Stack
C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python

Experience Level
Staff-Level (9+ years required)

Job Type
Full-Time

Pull requests are where collaboration happens on GitHub — where ideas turn into code, feedback drives quality, and teams ship with confidence. This Staff Software Engineer role owns the systems behind pull request creation, code review, and the Files Changed experience, working across the full PR product surface end-to-end from design through delivery. As AI agents increasingly participate in the development lifecycle, part of the job is evolving that review and merge experience so AI-authored code gets the same rigor as human-written code.

About GitHub

GitHub is looking for creative problem solvers who care as much about culture as they do about customers and features. The company believes how work gets done matters as much as what gets built — vision, shared purpose, a passion for quality, curiosity, and genuine investment in collaboration are what produce great results. This is a remote-first, distributed team that leans on async communication, deep work, and trust-based collaboration.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, test, and ship high-quality solutions that scale across GitHub’s services, with a particular focus on the pull request and code review workflow.
• Write maintainable code and get genuinely familiar with the systems you build, rather than just shipping and moving on.
• Give technical leadership, mentorship, and code review that raises the bar for the team, helping others write extensible code that plays nicely with downstream dependencies.
• Own the health and quality of what the team builds, including taking part in on-call rotations and live incident response.
• Work across the entire PR product surface — creation, review, merge workflows, and the Files Changed experience — owning features fully from design through delivery.
• Help evolve the code review and merge experience to properly support agent-driven development, where AI-authored code needs the same review rigor as anything a person writes.
• Write architecture briefs and proposals, and run code experiments to validate ideas for improving the PR experience.
• Drive the technical roadmap for pull requests and code review, making sure engineering effort is prioritized well and new technology gets adopted where it makes sense.
• Work with product, design, and platform engineering on technical discussions, including trade-offs and cost considerations, while guiding testing strategy and success metrics.

What You’ll Need

• 9+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field, with a track record of delivering production software in languages like C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
• Comfort with on-call rotations and incident response in a high-availability environment.
• Demonstrated technical leadership on large, cross-team initiatives — driving change that goes beyond just your own team.

GitHub currently has several openings under similar “Staff Software Engineer” titles across different teams (Billing, Database Infrastructure, Actions, and Pull Requests/Code Review). This description reflects the Pull Requests/Code Review team version, which was the closest confirmed match to this specific posting.