Why this job is exciting
We are creating a machine learning team at Sourcegraph, aimed at creating the most powerful coding assistant in the world. Many companies are trying, but Sourcegraph has a unique advantage: Our rich code intelligence data and powerful code search platform. In the world of prompting LLMs, context is key, and Sourcegraph’s context is simply the best you can get: IDE-quality, global-scale, and served lightning fast. Our code intelligence, married with modern AI, is already providing a remarkable alpha code-assistant experience. You can help us unlock its full potential, delivering a product that accelerates development in a way we only see every 10-15 years.
To head up this effort, we are looking for a seasoned and deeply technical engineering leader, versed in programming language semantics, with a strong AI/ML background and familiarity with recent techniques, who can help us deliver the world’s best coding assistant and ML-powered developer tooling, built on Sourcegraph’s mature, robust, and open code intelligence platform. And if you happen to have an entrepreneurial streak, you’re in luck: We have an enterprise distribution pipeline, so whatever you build can be deployed straight to enterprise customers with some of the largest codebases in the world, without all the go-to-market hassle you’d encounter in a startup.
Within one month, you will…
- Start building a trusting relationship with your direct reports and peers.
- Come up to speed on the Sourcegraph product and platform, which are complex and mature.
- Be set up for local development and familiar with the coding assistant’s basic architecture.
- Ship a substantial new feature to end users.
Within three months, you will…
- Help make the Beta launch as solid as possible.
- Finish hiring your world-class team.
- Be up to speed and driving Sourcegraph’s AI strategy.
Within six months, you will…
- Have delivered a world-class coding assistant to a dozen big-name companies.
- Meet regularly with customers and prospects, representing the company.
- Have established a longer-term roadmap that keeps us aligned with expected advances in LLMs.
About you
You are a polyglot hacker in the AI/ML space who wants to build and lead a world-class team to push the boundaries of AI, with a particular focus on leveraging Sourcegraph’s code intelligence to leapfrog competitors.
First, you have a deep understanding of programming languages, and tools that manipulate code. This could have taken any number of forms; e.g.:
- You’ve worked with grammars and parser generators, or Treesitter
- You’ve worked with compilers and semantic analysis, e.g. type systems
- You’ve written an interpreter, or worked on a virtual machine
- You’ve done static analysis involving scanning source code for semantic information
It doesn’t really matter how you know it, but it’s important that you’re familiar with the basic concepts of semantic representations of source code, and how they’re produced and consumed by tooling.
Second, your AI background could look like a few different things:
- You’ve worked on AI systems and have built ML at large tech companies
- You have a deep ML background and have demonstrated an ability to be customer and company focused
- You are hands-on and can build machine learning
- You are a Prompt Engineer and can take models and figure out how to speak to it in a way that yields different results
- You are an entrepreneurial engineer who can hack together prototypes quickly, get things out the door, and iterate
- You are an LLM hacker or a thought leader in the LLM space and can craft a roadmap that takes advantage of the space, especially with code intelligence
- You’ve worked in NLP or language models at a top-tier research lab
If you’ve been anywhere in the field lately, you can probably pick up enough about LLM capabilities to be able to drive this space, as it’s all greenfield.
Finally, you shouldn’t be a purist about languages. We may need to integrate the coding assistant into a wide variety of tooling contexts, each with its own programming language. You may find yourself writing in several programming languages along the journey, and hopefully you already know most of them a little anyway.