Engineering Manager - Agents + Search Platform

Hours & location

🌎 While we hire almost anywhere in the world, we have office hubs in select locations and expect this person to reside in the San Francisco Bay Area to be able to work from our office for several days per week.

Required locations:

• San Francisco, CA

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

If you're passionate about building AI-powered products and the infrastructure that powers them, this is a great job for you. Industrializing software development requires building a platform that deeply understands code and leverages state-of-the-art AI techniques. As the Engineering Manager for the Agents & Search Platform teams, you’ll lead two teams leveraging AI to understand and improve code: our customer-facing AI Agents—like our defect-reducing code review agent—and our core search platform, which powers interactions across our product suite. You’ll be at the center of some of our most exciting, high-impact work, helping shape the future of semantic code search and the agent-powered developer experience.

📅 Within one month, you will…

• Build strong relationships with your team, understanding their strengths, challenges, and how they collaborate.
• Deeply understand the current technical architecture of our Agents platform and Search stack, including Zoekt, LLM integrations, code context APIs, and our semantic ranking initiatives.
• Establish clear team rituals and alignment with product and design partners.
• Identify any gaps or inefficiencies in execution and propose a 30/60/90-day plan for improvement.

📅 Within three months, you will…

• Drive the development and successful iteration of at least one customer-facing AI Agent, ensuring it delivers real value and delight to users.
• Support the team in shipping improvements to our search infrastructure that enable code understanding that goes beyond basic search
• Develop a shared roadmap that brings together the short-term needs of product-focused Agent work with the long-term goals of building a scalable, extensible platform.

📅 Within six months, you will…

• Align the Agents and Search Platform teams with a cohesive technical and strategic vision, helping the team think like platform builders while shipping delightful user-facing products.
• Support team members in setting and achieving ambitious career goals.
• Partner with leadership to define the long-term vision for our AI Agents and next-generation code search.
• Increase cross-team collaboration, making it easier for other teams to build on top of our Agents and Search APIs.

📅 Within one year, you will…

• Build out a repeatable process for launching and maintaining AI Agents that are robust, reusable, and beloved by users.
• Improve the performance, accuracy, and semantic intelligence of our search platform in measurable ways.
• Be known across the org as a key driver of our AI and search strategy and a leader others love working with.

About you 

You are a seasoned engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of infrastructure and product, and who knows how to guide a team through ambiguity, innovation, and iteration. You believe deeply in building with empathy—for developers, for your team, and for the broader mission. You don’t just support execution—you inspire it.

• 💻 You have deep experience in one or more of the following areas: AI/ML platforms, search infrastructure, semantic search, information retrieval, or developer tools.
• 👥 You have led engineering organizations of ~9+ people and are comfortable managing engineers directly while also thinking systemically about scaling the team.
• ⚙️ You have experience leading teams that work on both user-facing product features and backend platforms or APIs.
• 🧭 You’re energized by messy, ambiguous problems and love bringing structure to them.
• 🌎 You are able to work onsite in our office in San Francisco.

Nice to haves:

• 🔍 Experience with or contributions to open source search tools like Zoekt or similar.
• 🛠️ Familiarity with LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent-based architectures.
• 🧠 A background in semantic search, embeddings, or code intelligence systems.
• 🚀 Previous experience launching new developer-facing products from 0 to 1.

Level

📊 This job is an M4.  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 M4 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 M4 pay band for your zone. The start of the M4 pay band for each zone is listed below:

• Zone 1: $260,000

📈 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 4.75 hours in total.

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

• [30m] Recruiter Screen
• [15m] 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] Technical Screen / Resume Deep Dive
• [60m] Technical Interview
• [45m] Cross-functional Team Collaboration Interview
• [60m] Peer Interview / Values Interview
• [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.