Staff Software Engineer - Agentic First

What You Will do

Architect & Lead With Agents : Drive the technical design of major agentic-first subsystems — service architecture, data models, and agent/tool integrations — by running long-running, multi-agent workflows across decomposition, orchestration, implementation, testing, and review.

Own a Product Area : Take major initiatives from ambiguous problem statements through technical design, multi-team execution, rollout, and long-term operability.

V erification Over Generation, at Scale : Spend your time on direction, review, and taste rather than line-by-line coding. Define the evals, harnesses, guardrails, and review rituals that let your team confidently ship code no human typed.

Define the Practice : Set the bar for how Sonatype engineers work with agents. Shape internal playbooks, tooling, and rituals; train Senior engineers in the craft; and raise the ceiling on what's possible.

Architecture, Security & Reliability : Own non-functional requirements for your area — performance, reliability, and security — with particular attention to software supply chain threats (malicious packages, dependency confusion, provenance, SBOM accuracy).

Cross-functional Leadership : Partner with Product, Security Research, UX, and Support leaders to translate ambiguous customer needs into concrete, shippable technical plans; conduct deep design reviews; and raise the quality bar through thoughtful mentorship.

Who You Are

Long-running Agentic Developer : Multi-step, long-running agent workflows are your default way of building software — well beyond Copilot-style autocomplete. You routinely orchestrate fleets of agents in parallel across planning, coding, testing, and review, and your own time is spent on direction, verification, and taste rather than generation.

Multi-agent Orchestration at Depth : Hands-on experience designing, running, and scaling multi-agent systems (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor background agents, custom orchestrators, LangGraph-style graphs) — including MCP tooling, shared context and memory, agent handoffs, and robust eval harnesses. You've shipped production work this way and have strong opinions on what holds up at scale.

Verification-first Mindset : You've internalized that the new leverage point is human judgment over machine generation. You define the evals, test harnesses, observability, and review workflows that let a team confidently ship code no one personally typed.

Shapes Leading-edge Practice : You don't just adopt agentic workflows — you define them. You've led internal rollouts, published, open-sourced, or otherwise pushed the state of the art on how engineers work alongside agents, and have a clear point of view on where the craft is heading.

Product Engineering Mindset: Half product, half engineering. You make product decisions independently and drive scope, trade-offs, and sequencing without constant PM hand-holding.

F ocused on What Matters: You want to build mission-critical products that drive revenue and transform how customers build software.

Staff-level Engineering Skills: 9-13+ years of professional software development, with a track record of leading multi-quarter technical initiatives that span multiple teams or services.

Deep Technical Foundation: Strong experience with Java, Cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP), and large-scale distributed systems — including performance tuning, data-intensive services, and production operability at scale.

DevSecOps & Supply Chain Depth: Working knowledge of software supply chain security — SBOM formats (CycloneDX, SPDX), SCA, SLSA provenance, Sigstore/cosign signing, vulnerability analysis (OSV, NVD), and common attack patterns against package ecosystems.

Deeply Curious: You push agentic tools to their limits — probing where they work, where they break, and how to make them better. You're energized by being early in a fundamentally new way of building software.

What We Are Proud Of

2025 Visionary in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Security Testing!

2025 AI Compliance Solution of the Year - AI Breakthrough Awards

2025 DEVIES Award to our SBOM Manager for a new product for its innovation and impact in developer technology

2024 Industry Leader in Forrester-Wave for Software Composition Analysis (2024 Q4 report)

Constellation AST Shortlist: Sonatype has been listed on the Constellation ShortList™ for Application Security Testing for 2024

Data Breakthrough Awards: Sonatype was announced as a 2024 winner in the "Open Source Data Solution of the Year."

SD Times: Best in Show Security

Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators 2024

The Herd Top 100 Private Software Companies 2024.

Diversity & Inclusion Working Groups

Parental Leave Policy

Paid Volunteer Time Off (VTO)