Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Sourcegraph is at the forefront of building AI tools to solve the biggest problems in the software industry. The senior agent engineer on Code Understanding will be the technical owner, setting the agentic direction for the team and making products measurably better, faster, and cheaper.
Responsibilities
- You'll design and harden the multi-step, tool-using agent loops behind current and new agentic experiences, turning research and experiments into reliable, observable, and affordable products at enterprise scale
- Crafting agentic products means needing to tell when a change actually helped, which is hard when agents keep changing and the product keeps shifting. You'll bring judgment about where evaluations earn their keep, when to use targeted smoke tests and metrics, and how to avoid noise dressed up as rigor, so we can move fast with confidence
- You'll decide which models we run where, drive upgrades, and fine-tune our own when that's the right call
- You'll push on how we ground models in a customer's code - retrieval, ranking, context windows, citations - to make answers more accurate and verifiable
- You'll treat cost and latency as product features, and profile, distill, cache, and right-size models so we can ship ambitious features sustainably
Skills
- You are a senior engineer and technical leader with hard-won skills in agent engineering - a blend of software engineering, machine learning, and statistics
- You have real agent engineering depth. You've built, trained, evaluated, and operated models in production
- You build with agents, fluently and opinionatedly. You've designed multi-step agentic systems and made them reliable, observable, and cost-bounded
- You are pragmatic about evaluations and conscious of cost. You know where evaluations earn their keep and where they mislead
- You operate autonomously on ambiguous problems. Given a rough product idea, a few customer quotes, and a Slack thread, you come back with a plan, a prototype, milestones, and a point of view on tradeoffs, without it being pre-scoped
- You contribute beyond your domain. As a senior IC, you go into whatever part of the codebase a problem requires, recognize issues beyond your immediate area, and translate between engineering goals and business objectives
- You up-level the people around you. You mentor by pairing on hard problems, providing substantive design and code reviews, and spreading agent engineering literacy across the team
- You're customer and product-driven. You're comfortable on customer calls and in feedback threads, you turn raw signals into requirements, scopes, and milestones
- You're pragmatic, not a perfectionist. You ship the smallest correct thing, prefer robust solutions over complicated ones, and keep a high-quality bar with simplicity
- You're a strong software engineer who can ship production services
- You're comfortable across our stack - Go on the backend, TypeScript on the frontend, GraphQL, Postgres, Docker - or you're clearly able and eager to get there
- You're fluent with agentic coding tools, and you understand and own every line it submits
- You're comfortable in an async-first, multi-service, fast-paced remote environment
- You've shipped an LLM-powered or agentic developer-facing product you can speak about opinionatedly: what worked, what didn't, what you'd do differently
- You've built evaluation systems for LLM or ML products
- You've fine-tuned, distilled, or trained models to meet cost, latency, or quality targets in production
- Experience with retrieval, ranking, embeddings, or search relevance
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers and translating their needs into a product
- Experience mentoring or up-leveling engineers, especially raising a team's agent engineering fluency
Company Overview