Principal Software Engineering Manager

Role Description

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents — and search is at the heart of it. As GitHub's lexical and semantic code search engine, Blackbird powers context retrieval for business-critical experiences across the platform and our Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code.

We're looking for a Principal Engineering Manager to lead the development of Blackbird. 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.

The ideal candidate has strategic vision, technical leadership in distributed systems 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

• 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.

Requirements

• Experience building or operating web-scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems.
• Expertise with systems programming languages — ideally Rust.
• 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.

Benefits

• The base salary range for this job is USD $160,200.00 - USD $425,000.00 /Yr.
• Roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock.
• Rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role.
• Certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization.