Senior Tech Lead, AI Code Platform at Sourcegraph

Who We Are

Sourcegraph's mission is to simplify complex codebases by providing clarity and control. As AI accelerates code creation, the tools for understanding, overseeing, and evolving that code have lagged. Sourcegraph offers engineering organizations full visibility, precise context for AI agents, and the ability to execute coordinated code changes at scale. We provide the essential context layer for teams to manage their codebases in an agentic development paradigm.

Our products like Code Search, Deep Search, MCP, and Agentic Batch Changes empower engineering teams and their AI tools with cross-repository context to navigate vast codebases confidently and implement changes across hundreds of repositories simultaneously. Leading companies such as Stripe, Reddit, and Leidos trust Sourcegraph to enhance their shipping speed and quality. We are backed by prominent investors like a16z, Sequoia, and Redpoint, and pride ourselves on being a globally distributed team committed to high agency, direct communication, and customer satisfaction.

Join us if you are passionate about building the infrastructure that enables every engineering team and their deployed agents to operate on their codebase with confidence.

Hours & Location

While Sourcegraph hires globally, for this specific role, we prefer candidates residing in Europe or those able to work within EST time zones. However, we encourage all qualified individuals to apply regardless of location. A key requirement is to overlap with Central European Summer Time (CEST) for a minimum of 20 hours per week.

Why This Role is Exciting

The Code Plane team at Sourcegraph is responsible for developing products that empower developers and their AI agents to act on code efficiently across the world's largest codebases. This includes “data plane” and “control plane” functionalities for enterprise code - the interfaces where intentions transform into code changes across potentially hundreds of repositories. This team builds products that both utilize AI and are designed for AI.

The roadmap, architecture, and daily technical decisions for this role are heavily influenced by a strong understanding and a clear perspective on AI models and agents - what they excel at, where they fall short, and how to design effective products around them. A deep, hands-on understanding and informed opinion about AI, rather than mere observation, is a strict requirement.

If you are eager to contribute directly to the AI agent ecosystem rather than passively observing it, this opportunity offers significant appeal. We are looking for a technical leader to guide this team. As agents redefine software development, our product surfaces are rapidly evolving, and our engineering teams are adapting accordingly. This is a unique chance to be a strong leader shaping development tools for the agentic era of coding.

The Code Plane team manages high stakes, fast moving products at the core of this shift, and requires a tech lead who can define technical and product direction, drive the roadmap from conception to shipment, and ensure the team remains unblocked and productive. You are a natural generalist, addressing challenges wherever they arise - be it backend, AI agent, or frontend - and serve as the go to person for cross functional issues.

Key Product Areas for the Team:

• Batch Changes: Our proven execution layer for large scale, cross repository changes, enabling developers to automate extensive code modifications across all enterprise repositories. This includes keeping code current, resolving critical security issues, and reducing technical debt, with each change tracked through checks and code review until it merges. Companies like Stripe, Uber, and Dropbox leverage Batch Changes for migrations, refactors, and security fixes.
• Agentic Batch Changes: The cutting edge agent for code changes at scale. Building on Batch Changes, an outer loop agent writes code modification programs and orchestrates coding agents to roll out changes across the world’s largest codebases, incorporating CI feedback loops and post publish remediation. This allows anything a single coding agent can do in one repository to be driven across thousands of repositories or within the largest monorepos.
• Code Monitors and Code Insights: Our "signals over code" products. Code Monitors provide notifications and alerts based on detected changes in critical code, such as leaked secrets, deprecated libraries, or re emerging anti patterns. Code Insights transforms codebase data into actionable information for business decisions, offering customizable dashboards that surface critical repository information for tracking migrations, dependency adoption, vulnerability mitigation, and code health over time.
• The src CLI tool: The command line interface used by humans and their agents to automate Sourcegraph within their workflows. With its natural, scriptable surface, it is rapidly becoming the connective tissue between Sourcegraph and the broader agent ecosystem.

The features your team delivers will be used directly by developers and by agents acting on their behalf. You will collaborate closely with Product, Design, Customer Engineering, and adjacent engineering teams to translate customer challenges into shipped products.

Your Journey at Sourcegraph

Within one month, you will…

• Build relationships across your team and immerse yourself in its product surfaces: Batch Changes, Agentic Batch Changes, Code Monitors, Code Insights, and the src CLI. Experience them as both a user and an agent would, forming an informed perspective on the most critical product and technical decisions to make next.
• Meet your cross functional partners in Product, Design, Solutions Engineering, and other engineering teams, beginning to translate customer feedback into a concrete plan for the team's next deliverables.
• Join the team's on call support rotation.

Within three months, you will…

• Take end to end ownership of a significant part of Agentic Batch Changes, personally shipping crucial components.
• Serve as the technical lead for the team's roadmap, scoping and sequencing projects across its product surfaces, establishing clear ownership expectations, and clarifying priorities.
• Enhance team practices to improve work reliability, including design, review, testing, and delivery processes.
• Mentor teammates and continue fostering high trust relationships.

Within six months, you will…

• Be recognized as the technical visionary for Code Plane, with teammates and the broader department deferring to your expertise on architecture, quality, and product trade offs in this domain.
• Be known across the company as the individual who deeply understands customer and agent ecosystem needs from Code Plane, and where Sourcegraph should strategically invest next.
• Confidently set the direction of the team's roadmap, backed by evidence, and mobilize other engineers to execute on it.

About You

You are a technical leader and software engineer whom others are inspired to follow. You define technical direction, make critical architectural and trade off decisions, and keep the team unblocked and moving forward. You prioritize customer outcomes over ticking off tasks. You contribute a technical perspective to what the team should and should not undertake, and you uphold a high quality bar through review culture, testing standards, and release practices. You collaborate with Product and Design to scope projects and make decisions on what to prioritize or cut to ensure timely delivery. You address the most challenging technical problems hands on, while also guiding your team's growth.

Experience with AI agents is a crucial aspect of this role. You have delivered solutions for the agent ecosystem - something agents or other programs interact with, supported by evaluations - allowing you to discern the impact of prompt, tool, or model changes. You can pinpoint precisely where agents fail because you have personally encountered and measured these limitations. You are capable of forming a position, advocating for it persuasively, and gaining consensus, even from those who initially disagreed, and you clearly articulate what would change your mind. You foster a collaborative, respectful, async first culture and proactively keep stakeholders informed.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Fluency across our technology stack, encompassing both backend and frontend: Go, TypeScript, SvelteKit, React, GraphQL APIs, PostgreSQL, and experience with Docker and Kubernetes in a multi service environment.
• A strong technical background, demonstrating the ability to provide architectural guidance, uphold code quality, and navigate trade offs.
• Proven experience on teams that develop end user product features, ideally developer tools, agent/AI products, CLIs, or other technical product surfaces.
• Experience closely partnering with Product and Design to take features from concept to shipment, and integrating customer feedback into the roadmap.
• You have built systems that agents or other programs call, not merely used an agent to build something. This includes MCP servers, agent SDKs, tool surfaces, harnesses, or CLIs designed for non human callers.
• Hands on experience using and reasoning about coding agents (e.g., Amp, Claude Code, Cursor), with strong opinions on effective human agent workflows.
• Async first communication skills and experience working in a globally distributed remote team.

Strongly Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience orchestrating autonomous work at scale and building resilient machinery: systems where failures resume rather than restart, costs remain within budget, and the blast radius is intentionally chosen rather than unexpectedly discovered.
• Experience owning a service you did not initially build, with paying customers on an inherited schema, and successfully improving it without a full rewrite.
• A track record of elevating the standards for other engineers, such as establishing testing or code review benchmarks or effectively working with AI assistants.
• Comfort in making architectural decisions where established patterns are absent, and equally comfortable revising them when new evidence emerges, without needing to have been correct initially.
• The ability to define what "good" looks like for a system without a single correct answer, build the necessary measurement to validate it, and maintain that standard even as conditions evolves.
• A knack for listening to customers, understanding underlying problems beyond surface symptoms, and proposing technical solutions the team can build.
• Experience as a Team or Tech Lead on a software engineering team.

Level

This position is designated as an IC5. Further details on our job leveling philosophy can be found in our Handbook.

Compensation

We offer above market salaries to attract exceptional talent who can focus on product development without financial concerns. As an open and transparent company, our compensation philosophy and pay bands are visible to all Sourcegraph teammates, ensuring our approach is equitable, clear, and competitive. Your base salary is determined by the IC5 pay band for your location zone (1-4). Our pay bands are informed by market data to provide competitive compensation globally. During the recruitment process, we will discuss the applicable salary range based on your job level, relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and location zone.

The starting salary for the IC5 pay band in specific zones is:

• Zone 2: $192,000 USD
• Zone 3: $144,000 USD

In addition to competitive cash compensation, we offer meaningful equity (aligning your success with Sourcegraph's success) and generous perks & benefits.

Interview Process

Below is the expected interview process for this role. While it may seem like many steps, we move quickly, and the process is designed to provide you with the information needed to determine if Sourcegraph is the right fit for you - interviewing is a two way street!

We anticipate the entire interview process will take approximately 4.75 hours.

Introduction Stage - Initial conversations to get to know you better:

• [30m] Recruiter Screen
• [60m] Hiring Manager Screen / Resume Deep Dive