Software Engineer - Platform [IC3]

Hours & location

🌎 While we hire almost anywhere in the world, we have a preference for someone to reside in the following locations for this role. However, if you feel qualified, we welcome you to apply regardless of location. No matter what, working hours must overlap with EST for at least 20 hours/week.

Preferred locations:

• EST
• Europe

Why this job is exciting

Source code is at the heart of Sourcegraph. We support multiple code hosts and retrieve, store, index, and serve source code - to end users, admins, and other internal services.

This role gives you the opportunity to solve complex, challenging, and highly technical problems for our customers, both internally and externally, help unleash the potential and productivity of our Engineering teams, and delight our customers with industry-leading quality software. 

The Platform team primarily focuses on building a fully managed platform for using Sourcegraph, Sourcegraph Cloud, our SaaS offering. As a member of the Platform team, you will work closely with both external customers and internal stakeholders to meet their needs. You will:

• Develop inter-cloud connectivity solutions to support enterprise customers from highly regulated industries to use Sourcegraph Cloud.
• Build a control plane to orchestrate a fleet of single-tenant Sourcegraph Cloud instances. 
• Expose complex infrastructure as API to support internal customers to iterate faster.
• Dive into upstream dependencies (e.g., CDK for Terraform, Terraform providers for GCP)  to debug and patch non-trivial problems.
• Be an advocate for building reliable services and work with leadership to help product teams achieve operational excellence. 
• Participate in on-call rotation to uphold our contractual SLA commitments.

📅 Within one month, you will…

• Onboard onto the Sourcegraph architecture, tooling, and development workflow.
• Build a solid understanding of the team’s areas of ownership, technical challenges, and problems the team solves for our customers, and know how all of these align with the top-level company goals.
• Actively participate in team meetings, sharing ideas and insights to contribute to the overall team goals.
• Start contributing to the team goals and deliverables by shipping new features, debugging issues, and fixing bugs.

📅 Within three months, you will…

• Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the Cloud infrastructure, its underlying technologies, and its integration within the Sourcegraph ecosystem.
• Lead initiatives contributing to team goals through both discovery and delivery phases, collaborating directly with product and design partners, other engineering teams, and non-technical stakeholders from different departments.
• Contribute to the architectural design and implementation of new features or improvements, actively shaping the future direction of Cloud infrastructure based on customer needs.
• Lead initiatives contributing to team goals on the roadmap by going through the entire product development lifecycle discovery, design, implementation, and delivery.
• Participate in our on-call rotation.

📅 Within six months, you will…

• Be defining long-term technical vision and strategies for new product development, scaling existing services, and managing technical debt. These plans will consist of multiple smaller milestones that you will deliver iteratively with the team.
• Collaborate with the Engineering Manager on defining the team’s growth strategy based on the long-term product vision, the technical vision, and the team’s needs.
• Seek feedback from customers and stakeholders to identify opportunities for further improvements or new features, actively iterating on the Cloud infrastructure to ensure it continues to meet our high bar.

About you 

You bring a product mindset in balancing architectural flexibility and philosophy with meeting immediate customer demand. You are an experienced software engineer who seeks to solve problems by writing code rather than through one-off operations. You are passionate about user experience and self-service. You balance maintaining and designing high-impact systems with a pragmatic understanding of how to make appropriate tradeoffs (e.g., cut scope, low-tech vs. custom complex solutions) to ship quickly and iterate when necessary. 

Qualifications:

• Proficiency in Go, or other strongly typed languages.
• Knowledge in one of the public cloud platform providers (GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Experience with Terraform (or similar IaC solutions) and Kubernetes to build tooling and automation.
• Skilled at debugging distributed systems, followed by designing and implementing solutions to those problems. This means you should know your way around various OS-level primitives, e.g., network, CPU, and memory.
• Ability to communicate clearly and empathetically, especially in writing and documentation.
• Preferred time zone between UTC-8 and UTC+2

Nice to haves:

• Built services and exposed them as API for external consumption  (e.g., gRPC).
• Comfortable implementing system-level software  (e.g., custom transport protocol) if needed or has contributed to Kubernetes controllers/operators.
• Published blog posts and/or tech talks about your work.
• Experience working on small high-performing teams, preferably tech startups.

Level

📊 This job is an IC3.  You can read more about our job leveling philosophy in our Handbook.

Compensation

💸 We pay above-market salaries because we want to hire exceptional people who can focus on building great products, not worrying about paying bills. As an open and transparent company, our compensation philosophy and pay bands are visible to every Sourcegraph teammate, and we strive to make our approach equitable, explainable, and competitive.

Your base salary is determined by the IC3 pay band for your location zone (1-4). Our pay bands are informed by market data and designed to ensure competitive compensation wherever you live. During the recruiting process, we'll discuss the range applicable to you based on job level, relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and location zone.

💰The starting salary for the IC3 pay band in each zone is:

• Zone 2: $148,000 USD
• Zone 3: $111,000 USD
• Zone 4: $74,000 USD

📈 In addition to competitive cash compensation, we offer meaningful equity (because when Sourcegraph succeeds, we want you to succeed, too) and generous perks & benefits.

Interview process 

Below is the interview process you can expect for this role (you can read more about the types of interviews in our Handbook). It may look like a lot of steps, but rest assured that we move quickly and the steps are designed to help you get the information needed to determine if we’re the right fit for you… Interviewing is a two-way street, after all! 

We expect the interview process to take 4.75 hours in total.

👋 Introduction Stage - we have initial conversations to get to know you better…

• [30m] Recruiter Screen
• [45m] Hiring Manager Screen / Resume Deep Dive

🧑‍💻 Team Interview Stage - we then delve into your experience in more depth and introduce you to members of the team, including cross-functional partners…

• [Async] Take-home exercise
• [60m] Take-home exercise walkthrough
• [60m] Pairing Exercise 
• [60m] Cross-functional Team Collaboration Interview / Values Interview 

🎉 Final Interview Stage - we move you to our final round, where you gain a better understanding of our business and values holistically…

• [30m] Leadership
• We check references and conduct your background check

Please note - you are welcome to request additional conversations with anyone you would like to meet, but didn’t get to meet during the interview process.