GitHub helps companies, organizations, and groups of individuals succeed by allowing them to build better software, together. The successful launch of GitHub Copilot as a Technical Preview in June 2021 has demonstrated the possibilities of AI-assisted software development.

Since that launch, GitHub has been working towards making the product generally available. The engineering organization is now looking for developers to join the Copilot Model Improvements team to improve the quality of Copilot’s underlying machine learning model and its suggested completions.

The Copilot team currently has three subteams:

• Model Improvements: Responsible for improving the quality of the code suggested by Copilot.
• IDE: Responsible for delivering the GitHub Copilot IDE extension in a range of supported editors. 
• Foundations: responsible for the Copilot backend services, integration into GitHub proper, and data pipelines.

The Copilot Model Improvements aims to improve the completions that are the core of Copilot. The team has close partnerships with Microsoft Azure AI Platform and OpenAI. It also has strong links with GitHub Next, a research team within GitHub investigating the future of software development, where Copilot was originally incubated. 

The Copilot team is highly distributed and the right candidate will thrive in an environment of asynchronous communication. We expect you to have excellent written communication skills and be able to create working relationships with coworkers in locations around the globe.

Responsibilities

• Propose new techniques to improve the quality of Copilot’s suggestions.
• Write production code to implement these techniques, which will be shipped in the Copilot IDE clients.
• Construct and execute experiments to evaluate the impact of these techniques.
• Collaborate closely with other parts of the wider Copilot team.

Minimum Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills.
• Some background in Machine Learning.
• Experience in at least one of the following fields:
• Developer tooling
• Program/static analysis
• Compilers and compiler construction

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with applying scientific thinking to a software product: formulating a hypothesis, conducting an experiment, and validating the hypothesis.

Nothing in life is perfect, including this job description. You may be an excellent fit even if you don’t meet all of these qualifications. We look forward to meeting you and hearing about your unique skills and experiences!