Senior Software Engineer - Copilot CLI

Microsoft
San Francisco Bay area / New York City metropolitan area2026-01-07onsite

About the job

Within GitHub and Microsoft CoreAI, the Copilot CLI team builds GitHub’s coding agent in the terminal, and the core agent loop that powers agentic experiences across GitHub and Microsoft. Our work spans the full software development lifecycle, with a focus on turning modern AI systems into reliable, production-grade developer tools.

Responsibilities

Take ownership of critical product and platform areas of the Copilot CLI and shared agent runtime

Set a high technical and quality bar for agentic systems and developer-facing tooling

Design and ship performant, reliable terminal experiences that developers depend on for daily work

Use data, benchmarks, and direct user feedback to guide iteration and investment

Collaborate across org boundaries to enable other teams to build agentic products on top of a shared foundation

Influence architecture, technical direction, and engineering standards beyond your immediate team

Qualifications

Minimum

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements: Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years

Preferred

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. Hands-on experience building and operating generative AI or agentic systems in production, with direct ownership over quality, reliability, and iteration 5+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing developer products, with depth across platform/foundation systems and user-facing experiences Strong product mindset with a track record of owning ambiguous problem spaces and driving them to high-quality outcomes Solid engineering fundamentals, including systems design, performance, and debugging in complex production environments Experience designing, running, and optimizing evaluations for agentic systems, including tools, prompts, and agent loops Experience building terminal user interfaces (TUIs) or working with low-level terminal primitives is a strong plus Experience contributing to or leading open-source projects at scale is a plus