Software Engineer - Search Platform [IC4]

Hours & location

🌎 While we are an all-remote company and 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 PST for at least 10 hours/week.

Preferred locations:

• San Francisco (in-office)
• North America (remote) 
• South America (remote) 
• EMEA (remote) 

We do not subscribe to “I do my best work when I work 40 hours a week.”  People we hire at Sourcegraph believe that building outstanding things means working very hard — smarter and more hours than the competition.

Why this job is exciting 

As a Software Engineer on Sourcegraph's Search Platform team, you will play a central role in developing innovative code search solutions. Our search tool is trusted by some of the world's largest organizations to answer complex questions about their source code that no other tool can address. The Search Platform team is responsible for the systems that index and query code, delivering high-quality results to both users and AI agents. The team works across the search stack from optimizing low level index storage to leveraging ML models to optimize the ranking and relevance of search results.

• Indexed and unindexed search (Zoekt & Searcher)
• Cody Context
• Diff/commit search
• Result ranking
• Open source indexing, current at over 2.5M repos!
• Code Symbols indexing and search

📅 Within one month, you will…

• Meet with and get to know your peers and other people around the company to gain a sense of the team and organization.
• Familiarize yourself with the product and the area of focus for the search core team and how they align with top-level company goals.
• Contribute to our software with commits and code reviews.

📅 Within three months, you will…

• Build rapport with the search team and become an effective and proactive asynchronous communicator in a team-oriented environment.
• Increase understanding of the product, technology, and tools to become comfortable with diagnosing issues, proposing and leading solutions.
• Actively contribute to the team’s technical discussions, architecture designs and help your team grow technical and non-technical skills.
• Participate in the team’s on-call and support rotation.

📅 Within six months and beyond, you will…

• By writing and reviewing RFCs and stories and collaborating with the team, you will actively shape the direction and participate in the planning of the features to be built by the team.
• You will collaborate with your engineering peers on identifying and solving different technical and organizational challenges in a rapidly growing engineering organization. 

About you

You are a software engineer with the skills and proven ability to build and deploy production-ready distributed software and services at scale. You enjoy being part of a team, collaborating to accelerate learning and teaching. You are someone who understands that success is measured by our customers, and that everything that impacts customer satisfaction is part of your job. You are strongly aligned with our values, inspired by our mission to make it so that everyone can code, and motivated to do your best work at Sourcegraph.

• You are proficient in Go, or have a solid foundation in other strongly-typed programming languages and are keen on getting up to speed with Go in your first months at Sourcegraph. 
• Strong background in information retrieval concepts and search engine fundamentals, including relevancy and ranking algorithms
• Experience with large-scale search indexing systems
• Systems programming expertise with focus on performance, scalability, and storage optimization
• Track record of delivering end-to-end search solutions from architecture through implementation
• You tend to deliver work incrementally to get feedback and iterate on your solutions. 
• You communicate well, accept and incorporate feedback from others, and are happy to work both on features and less-glamorous (but still critical) tasks. 
• You enjoy working on highly collaborative, dynamic, and remote teams in a startup environment.

Nice to haves:

• Experience with repository management at scale using Git, Perforce, CVS, or other version control systems.
• Experience with relational databases such as Postgres, including query optimization and performance tuning.
• Experience with instrumenting applications.
• Published blog posts and/or tech talks about your work.
• Developer tool or platform industry experience.
• You have experience building SaaS and on-premise applications.
• A passion for efficient solutions and optimizations of existing systems.

Level

📊 This job is an IC4.  You can read more about our job leveling philosophy in our Handbook.

Compensation

💸 We pay you an above-average salary because we want to hire the best people who are fully focused on helping Sourcegraph succeed, not worried about paying bills. As an open and transparent company that values competitive compensation, our compensation ranges are visible to every single Sourcegraph teammate.

Your salary is determined by your pay band for the IC4  job level. For determining pay bands, we use a number of market and data-driven salary sources, along with your location zone, and target the high-end of the range to ensure we’re always paying above market regardless of where you live in the world. Both U.S. and international locations are divided into one of four zones, determined by the cost of labor index for each area. The salary for a successful candidate will be based on level, job-related skills, experience, qualifications, and location zone. Please note that the salaries below may be adjusted in the future.

💰 The target compensation for this role is based on the IC4 pay band for your zone. The start of the IC4 pay band for each zone is listed below:

• Zone 1: $215,000 USD
• Zone 2: $172,000 USD
• Zone 3: $129,000 USD
• Zone 4: $86,000 USD 

Please speak with a recruiter for additional information regarding zone locations.

📈 In addition to our cash compensation, we offer equity (because when we succeed as a company, 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 5 hours and 35 minutes in total.

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

• [30m] Recruiter Screen
• [20m] Hiring Manager Screen

🧑‍💻 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] Coding exercise
• [60m] Coding exercise
• [60m] System design
• [45m] Technical Screen / Resume Deep Dive

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

• [45m] Cross-functional team collaboration / Values
• [15m] Leadership with co-founder 
• 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.