Head of AI

Head of AI

at Sourcegraph

Remote

ALL SOURCEGRAPH ROLES ARE FULLY REMOTE

Who we are

Our mission at Sourcegraph is to make it so that everyone can code, not just ~0.1% of the population. Our code intelligence platform helps developers and companies with billions of lines of code create the software you use every day. By enabling more people to code, we believe we will create economic opportunity across the world and will drive progress that benefits everyone.

It’s an exciting time to join Sourcegraph. Our business is growing rapidly: we’ve experienced exponential growth and our $125M Series D from Andreessen Horowitz and $50M Series C from Sequoia have given us the opportunity to make big ambitious bets on our future. We have a huge market (every company that builds software) and massive opportunity (most developers haven’t even heard of code intelligence yet, but once you’ve used it, you can’t live without it–just like Google). By continuing to hire exceptional people, we have the opportunity to make Sourcegraph one of the biggest technology companies in the world.

Working hours

Given that we are an all-remote company and hire almost anywhere in the world, we don’t have a particular time-zone preference for this role. However, you may need to be available for non-recurring urgent meetings outside of working hours.

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.

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. You will have the flexibility to work and live anywhere in the world (unless specified otherwise in the job description), and we’ll never take your location or current/past salary information into account when determining your compensation. As an open and transparent company that values equitable and competitive compensation for everyone, our compensation ranges are visible to every single Sourcegraph Teammate. To determine your salary, we use a number of market and data-driven salary sources and target the high-end of the range, ensuring that we’re always paying above market regardless of where you live in the world.

The target compensation for this role is $243,000 USD base.

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 [~5.5 hour total interview]

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 ~5.5 hours in total.

Introduction Stage – we have initial conversations to get to know you better

• [30m] Recruiter Screen with Grace Bohl
• [45m] Technical Background with Beyang Liu
• [30m] Hiring Manager Screen with Steve Yegge

Team Interview Stage – we then delve into your experience in more depth and introduce you to members of the team

• [60m] Resume Deep Dive with Grace Bohl
• [45m] Technical Deep Dive with Dominic Cooney and Julie Tibshirani
• [60m] Peer Interview with Erika Rice Scherpelz and Chris Pine
• [Async] Pairing Exercise with the team

Final Interview Stage – we move you to our final round, where you meet cross-functional partners and gain a better understanding of our business and values holistically

• [30m] Values Interview
• [30m] Leadership Interview with Quinn Slack
• 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.

Not sure if this is you?

We want a diverse, global team, with a broad range of experience and perspectives. If this job sounds great, but you’re not sure if you qualify, apply anyway! We carefully consider every application, and will either move forward with you, find another team that might be a better fit, keep in touch for future opportunities, or thank you for your time.

Learn more about us

To create a product that serves the needs of all developers, we are building a diverse all-remote team that is distributed across the world. Sourcegraph is an equal opportunity workplace; we welcome people from all backgrounds and communities.

We provide competitive compensation and practical benefits to keep you happy and healthy so that you can do your best work.

Learn more about what it is like to work at Sourcegraph by reading our handbook.

We want to ensure Sourcegraph is an environment that suits your working style and empowers you to do your best work, so we are eager to answer any questions that you have about us at any point in the interview process.