ML & Agentic Systems Engineer [IC4]

• Design and harden multi-step, tool-using agent loops for agentic products at enterprise scale
• Craft pragmatic evaluation strategies to measure agent quality and product improvements
• Own model selection, upgrades, and fine-tuning decisions across product surfaces
• Drive retrieval and context engineering to ground models in customer code accurately
• Optimize cost and latency as product features through profiling, distillation, and caching
• Set technical direction and standards for ML and agentic systems across the team
• Own end-to-end agentic product slices from problem-framing through rollout and measurement
• Establish responsible model and prompt change shipping processes with evals and guardrails

Who we are

Our mission is to bring clarity and control to the world's most complex codebases. AI is accelerating code creation, but the infrastructure to understand, oversee, and evolve that code hasn't kept pace. Sourcegraph gives engineering organizations full visibility across their systems, precise context for their agents, and the ability to execute coordinated code changes at scale. As agentic development becomes the dominant engineering paradigm, we provide the context layer teams need to take control of their codebase.

With Code Search, Deep Search, MCP, and Agentic Batch Changes, we deliver on that mission today - giving engineering teams and their AI tools the cross-repo context to navigate massive codebases with confidence, and the ability to make changes across hundreds of repositories at once.

Companies like Stripe, Reddit, and Leidos rely on Sourcegraph to ship faster and with higher quality. We're backed by a16z, Sequoia, and Redpoint, and proud to operate as a globally distributed team that values high agency, direct communication, and customer love.

If you want to build the infrastructure that lets every engineering team - and every agent they deploy - operate on their codebase with confidence, join us.

Hours & location

🌎 While we 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 EST for at least 20 hours/week.

• Europe

• North America

Why this job is exciting

Sourcegraph is at the forefront of building AI tools to solve the biggest problems in the software industry, problems that only get bigger as codebases grow and as more of the work is done by agents. The Code Understanding team owns the surfaces where that intelligence meets the developer: Deep Search, our agentic, multi-step answer engine across an enterprise's entire lineup of codebases, Query Assist, turning natural language queries into Sourcegraph query syntax, Smart Hovers, concisely summarizing symbols right where devs need it, guided diff review, and the APIs that both humans and AI agents rely on every day.

Most of what makes those surfaces tick is agent engineering: a blend of software engineering, machine learning, and statistics. Agent engineering tells us which model to use and when, how to retrieve and pack context, how to measure answer quality, where to fine-tune or distill a smaller model to cut costs and latency, and how to expand a single LLM call into a reliable multi-step agent. As the staff ML and agent engineer on Code Understanding, you'll be the technical owner of it: setting the tam’s direction for models, evaluations, and agentic systems, making our products measurably better, faster, and cheaper, and raising the team's fluency in building with models.

This is a staff-level role: we're hiring a technical leader, not just a strong individual contributor. The primary need is a production ML and evaluation authority who also builds production agent systems. You'll own the hardest, most ambiguous problems in this space, set standards others follow, and influence direction beyond your immediate team. You'll get the exhilarating chance to drive the vision on how we can provide the best code understanding experience on the market by combining our deterministic, large-scale systems and AI into experiences never seen before.

• Agentic systems. You'll design and harden the multi-step, tool-using agent loops behind current and new agentic experiences, turning research and experiments into reliable, observable, and affordable products at enterprise scale.

• Pragmatic use of evaluations. Crafting agentic products means needing to tell when a change actually helped, which is hard when agents keep changing and the product keeps shifting. You'll bring judgment about where evaluations earn their keep, when to use targeted smoke tests and metrics, and how to avoid noise dressed up as rigor, so we can move fast with confidence.

• Models: selection, upgrading, and training. You'll decide which models we run where, drive upgrades, and fine-tune our own when that's the right call.

• Retrieval and context engineering. You'll push on how we ground models in a customer's code - retrieval, ranking, context windows, citations - to make answers more accurate and verifiable.

• Cost and latency. Every surface has a per-user economic budget. You'll treat cost and latency as product features, and profile, distill, cache, and right-size models so we can ship ambitious features sustainably.

You'll do this on a small, senior-leaning team that ships quickly, owns a lot of product surface, and has streamlined product management: engineers here talk to customers, frame the problem, and own it end-to-end. You'll have real agency over technical direction and a direct line to the impact of your work.

📅 Within one month, you will…

• Get the Code Understanding products and their model/agent pipelines running end-to-end locally, and land your first improvements to a model, prompt, retrieval path, or eval.

• Build a clear picture of where the AI engineering pain is, and the product surfaces most constrained by them.

• Get to know the team and our customers, and start forming your own opinions about where our agentic products should go next.

• Join the team's on-call support rotation.

📅 Within three months, you will…

• Own a meaningful agentic slice of the product end-to-end, driving it from problem-framing through rollout and measurement.

• Establish how the team ships model and prompt changes responsibly: the evals, dashboards, and guardrails that make quality and cost regressions visible before customers feel them.

• Begin up-leveling teammates in building with models by pairing with them, reviewing their code, and modeling good agent engineering inst

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