Senior Software Engineer, sonatype
Agentic First
Software supply chain management platform
Be an early applicant
Software supply chain management platform
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To change how the world innovates by making software development easier.
Role
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 regularly orchestrate multiple agents in parallel across planning, coding, testing, and review, and your own time is spent directing and verifying rather than generating
- Multi-agent Orchestration in Practice: Hands-on experience running and composing multiple agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor background agents, or equivalents) — including MCP tools, custom prompts/skills, shared context, and eval loops that keep output trustworthy
- Verification-first Mindset: You've internalized that the new leverage point is human judgment over machine generation. You write and maintain evals, test harnesses, and review workflows that let you confidently ship code you didn't personally type
- Drawn to Leading-edge Practice: You're energized by being early in a new way of building software, tracking what's happening on the frontier, and bringing new techniques back to your team
- Product Engineering Mindset: You think in terms of customer outcomes, not just tickets, and can make sensible product trade-offs in partnership with PM and design
- Focused on What Matters: You want to build mission-critical products that drive revenue and transform how customers build software
- Senior-level Engineering Skills: 4+ years of professional software development, including meaningful experience shipping and operating production services
- Solid Technical Foundation: Strong experience with Java and at least one major cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP). Comfortable working in distributed systems — APIs, databases, queues, and the failure modes that come with them
- Exposure to DevSecOps & Supply Chain Security: Familiarity with concepts like SBOMs, SCA, vulnerability management, dependency hygiene, and artifact/package ecosystems — or strong interest in going deep here
- 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 the job involves
- As an agentic-first Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and ship agentic-first features within Nexus Repository Manager.
- You'll own meaningful pieces of the product end-to-end, and long-running multi-agent development workflows will be your primary mode of work — you'll spend most of your time directing and verifying agents rather than hand-typing code. You'll partner with Staff and Principal engineers to deliver capabilities that help enterprises secure their software supply chains at massive scale
- Ship customer-facing, agentic-first features in a product used by 15 million developers and 70% of the Fortune 100
- Practice a fundamentally new way of building software — long-running, multi-agent development — alongside Staff and Principal engineers who are defining the craft
- Work on real distributed systems problems — Java, cloud, data, and security — in a codebase that matters to the global open source ecosystem
- Grow into a Staff trajectory with clear mentorship, meaningful ownership, and direct exposure to how agentic tooling is reshaping engineering
- Design & Deliver With Agents: Design and implement scalable, high-performance features across the stack by driving long-running, multi-agent development workflows end-to-end — decomposition, orchestration, implementation, testing, and review
- Own Your Work End-to-End: Take features from ambiguous requirements through design, implementation, rollout, and on-call operability, using agents to move faster without compromising quality
- Verification Over Generation: Spend your time on direction, review, evals, and testing rather than line-by-line coding. Build and use the harnesses and guardrails that let you trust what the agents output
- Advance the Practice: Contribute to internal playbooks, tooling, and rituals for how Sonatype engineers work with agents — sharing what's working, what isn't, and what we should try next
- Quality, Security & Reliability: Write and ship clean, well-tested, observable code. Apply software supply chain security best practices to everything you deliver
- Collaboration: Partner with Product, UX, and fellow engineers to translate customer needs into shippable solutions, and raise the quality bar through thoughtful code review and mentorship of earlier-career engineers
Our take
Sonatype has been a heavy weight in the world of supply chain management since 2008. Specializing in analzying and securing open-sopurce code, it plays a crucial role behind the scenes of some of the world's largest tech player, including Apple, and Linux. With over a decade of experience, its won a reputation as a go-to in the software supply chain space.
A major turning point for the company came in 2019, when private equity giant Visa Equity PArtners acquired it, signaling some serious momentum. Fast forward to 2022, and Sonatype hit a big milestone: $100M in annual recurring revenue and a growing global workforce. It also revealed it will be going public, riding the wave of explosive interest in cybersecurity and software supply chain tools.
The market for these tools is cleary heating up but Sonatype isn't just another name in the crowd, it's got longevity, credibility, and a good eye for spotting what's next. In a space that's growing fast and always changing, Sonatype's deep roots and ongoing growth certainly give it a solid edge.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Sep 2018
$80m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Feb 2016
$30m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $154.7m
Company benefits
- Competitive benefits package
- Flexible work and schedule
- Annual wellness week
- Paid volunteer time off
- Full parental/maternity (birth or adoption) leave
Company HQ
Maple Lawn, Fulton, MD
Leadership
Brian Fox
(Co-Founder & CTO)Currently OpenSSF Governing Board Member at OpenSSF and Official Member at Forbest Technology Council and Apaches Software Foundation.
Wayne Jackson
(CEO)Joined Sonatype in 2010 as CEO. Previously the CEO of Sourcefire (part of Cisco) and Riverbed Technologies.
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