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:
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to define and build the foundational systems for GitHub’s Enterprise AI Platform.
This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, AI/agent platforms, developer tooling, identity, policy, and platform architecture. You will shape how AI agents operate safely and consistently across IDEs, CLI, MCP, long-running agents, and future Copilot experiences.
This is a highly strategic, high-ambiguity role with broad technical influence across Copilot, platform infrastructure, client experiences, identity, billing, and enterprise products.
You will define platform primitives that shape enterprise AI adoption across millions of developers and tens of thousands of organizations across GitHub’s ecosystem.
Responsibilities:
This is a systems architecture and platform definition role requiring deep technical ownership across multiple organizations.
- Define Enterprise AI Control Plane Architecture: Drive the technical direction for a unified AI control plane spanning models, agents, tools, MCP, permissions, spend, plugins, and client settings with a vision of policy authored once, enforced consistently everywhere.
- Build Foundational Platform Primitives: Architect scalable policy engines, governance SDKs, client-side enforcement frameworks, and extensible schemas for agentic workflows.
- Drive Cross-Client Consistency: Partner across Copilot CLI, IDE, agent, and platform teams to standardize policy enforcement through reusable APIs, contracts, and SDK patterns.
- Solve Hard Distributed Systems Problems at Scale: Design reliable, scalable, secure, and resilient systems for policy evaluation, spend enforcement, permissions, auditability, and observability supporting millions of developers.
- Influence GitHub’s AI Platform Strategy: Partner with engineering and product leaders to shape the long-term enterprise AI roadmap, technical direction and cross-organizational alignment.
- Raise the Engineering Bar: Mentor senior engineers and elevate architectural rigor, systems thinking, and technical execution across teams.
Qualifications:
Required 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 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 equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications:
Deep Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or platform infrastructure.
Platform & Systems Design: Strong expertise designing scalable systems across APIs, identity, policy engines, security, reliability, and infrastructure platforms.
AI / Platform Experience: Proven experience building platform infrastructure, developer platforms, AI systems, or large-scale technical platforms.
Cross-Organizational Technical Leadership: Demonstrated success driving architecture, platform adoption, and alignment across multiple teams.
Influence Without Authority: Strong track record of shaping technical direction and delivering outcomes across organizational boundaries.
Builder Mindset: Comfortable operating in ambiguity and fast-moving environments, creating clarity, and balancing long-term platform investments with pragmatic execution.
Preferred Experience: Background in AI/LLM systems, agentic platforms, developer tooling, governance systems, enterprise software, or cloud-native systems (Azure, Kubernetes, AKS) is a plus.
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 Leadership Principles:
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!
