Tech Lead - Code Plane [IC5]

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 CEST for at least 20 hours/week.

Preferred locations:

• Europe
• EST

Why this job is exciting

The Code Plane team owns the Sourcegraph products that help developers - and the agents working on their behalf - take action on code, at scale, across the world's largest codebases. Think “data plane” and “control plane” for enterprise code: the surfaces where intent becomes code changes across hundreds (or more!) of repositories.

This is a team that builds products that use AI and products for AI. The roadmap, the architecture, and the day-to-day technical decisions all hinge on a solid experience with and a clear-eyed view of what AI models and agents are good at, where they fail, and how to design products around them. A strong handle on and opinion of AI, formed from real-world, hands-on use, not just observation, is a hard requirement for this role. If you're excited to ship for the AI agent ecosystem rather than simply watch from the sidelines, you'll find a lot to love here.

We're hiring you to be the technical leader around whom this team rallies. Our product surfaces are evolving drastically as agents reshape how software is built, and we are adjusting our engineering teams to match. It is an exciting time, and a rare chance to be a strong leader shaping dev tools for the agentic age of coding. Code Plane owns high-stakes, fast-moving products at the center of that shift and needs a tech lead who will set technical and product direction, drive the roadmap from issue to shipped, and keep the team unblocked and moving. You are a generalist by choice. You go where the problem is, backend, AI agent, or frontend, and you are who people come to when it crosses a boundary.

The team's surface areas include:

• Batch Changes - our battle-tested execution layer for massive cross-repo changes helps developers automate large-scale code changes across all of an enterprise's repositories: keeping code up-to-date, fixing critical security issues, and paying down tech debt, with every change tracked through checks and code review until it merges. Teams at Stripe, Uber, and Dropbox, and others use it to drive migrations, refactors, and security fixes.
• Agentic Batch Changes. The frontier agent for code changes at scale. Building on the foundation of Batch Changes, an outer-loop agent writes  code-modification programs and orchestrates coding agents to roll out changes across the world’s largest codebases, complete with CI feedback loops and post-publish remediation. Anything a single coding agent can do in one repository, Agentic Batch Changes drives across all of them at once, from thousands of repositories to the largest monorepos.
• Code Monitors and Code Insights - our "signals over code" products. Code Monitors notify and alert based on detected changes in critical code. A leaked secret, a deprecated library, an anti-pattern creeping back in can all turn into alerts. Code Insights turns a codebase into data to back up business decisions and customizable dashboards surfacing critical info about repos so devs can track what matters over time - migration progress, dependency adoption, vulnerability mitigation, code health - with data-driven answers.
• The src CLI tool - the command-line surface that humans and the agents they employ use to automate Sourcegraph in their workflows. With a natural, scriptable surface, it's quickly becoming the connective tissue between Sourcegraph and the agent ecosystem.

The features your team ships are used directly by developers and by agents working on their behalf, and you'll partner closely with Product, Design, Customer Engineering, and adjacent engineering teams to turn customer pain into shipped product. 

📅 Within one month, you will…

• Build relationships across your team and familiarize yourself with its surface area - Batch Changes, Agentic Batch Changes, Code Monitors, Code Insights, src CLI - by running them as a user and an agent would, and form a point of view on the most important product and technical bets to make next.
• Meet your cross-functional partners in Product, Design, Solutions Engineering, and adjacent engineering teams, and start translating customer feedback into a concrete view of what the team should ship.
• Join the team's on-call support rotation.

📅 Within three months, you will…

• Own a meaningful slice of Agentic Batch Changes end-to-end and ship critical pieces yourself.
• Be the technical lead for the team's roadmap, scoping and sequencing projects across the team's product surfaces, setting clear expectations for ownership, and clarifying priorities.
• Strengthen the team practices that make their work reliable: how we design, review, test, and deliver.
• Mentor teammates and continue to build high-trust relationships.

📅 Within six months, you will…

• Be the recognized technical visionary for Code Plane: to your teammates, and increasingly the wider department, defer to on architecture, quality, and product trade-offs in this space.
• Be known across the company as the person who deeply understands what customers and agent ecosystems need from Code Plane, and where Sourcegraph should invest next.
• Be setting the direction of the team's roadmap with conviction backed by evidence, and mobilizing other engineers to execute on it.

About you

You are a technical leader and software engineer whom people want to follow. You set technical direction, make the hard architecture and tradeoff calls, and keep the team unblocked and moving. You think in terms of customers and outcomes, not tickets. You bring a technical perspective to what the team should and should not take on, and you make the quality bar real: review culture, testing standards, and release practices. You’re scoping with Product and Design and making calls on what to cut so the team can ship. You’re tackling our hardest technical problems hands-on, and also guiding your team to grow.

Agents are one of the most important parts of this job. You have shipped for the agent ecosystem: something that agents or other programs call, with evals behind it, so you know whether a prompt, tool, or model change made things better or worse. You can say precisely where agents fail, because you have encountered it yourself and measured it.

You can take a position, argue it persuasively, and bring people with you, including the ones who started out disagreeing, and you say plainly what would change your mind. You contribute to a collaborative, respectful, async-first culture, and you keep stakeholders informed without being asked.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Fluency across our stack, backend and frontend: Go, TypeScript, SvelteKit and React, GraphQL APIs, PostgreSQL, and Docker and Kubernetes in a multi-service environment.
• A strong technical background,  with the ability to provide technical guidance on architecture, code quality, and trade-offs.
• Proven experience on teams that build end-user product features — ideally developer tools, agent/AI products, CLIs, or other technical product surfaces.
• Experience partnering closely with Product and Design to take features from idea to shipped, and incorporating customer feedback into the roadmap.
• You have built something that agents or other programs call, not just something you used an agent to build. MCP servers, agent SDKs, tool surfaces, harnesses, or a CLI designed for non-human callers.
• Hands-on experience using and reasoning about coding agents (Amp, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar), with strong opinions about what good looks like when humans and agents share a workflow.
• Async-first communication skills and experience working in a globally distributed remote team.

Strongly preferred

• You have orchestrated autonomous work at scale and built the machinery that survives it: failures that resume rather than restart, costs that stay inside a budget, and a blast radius you chose deliberately rather than discovered.
• Experience owning a service you did not build, with paying customers on a schema you inherited, and making it better without a rewrite.
• A track record of raising the bar for other engineers, such as a testing or code review standard or working with AI assistants
• You are comfortable making architectural decisions where no established pattern exists, and equally comfortable revising them when the evidence turns, without needing to have been right the first time.
• You can decide what good looks like for a system that has no single correct answer, build the measurement that proves it, and hold that standard as the ground shifts underneath you.
• You can sit with a customer, listen past the symptom, and come back with a technical bet the team can build.
• Experience as a Team or Tech Lead on a software engineering team.

Level

📊 This job is an IC5.  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 IC5 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 IC5 pay band in each zone is:

• Zone 2: $192,000 USD
• Zone 3: $144,000 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
• [60m] 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…

• [60m] System Design
• [60m] Harden a code research agent
• [60m] Cross-functional team collaboration / Values

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

• [30] 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.