Staff Software Engineer - Agentic First

Sonatype is the software supply chain security company. We provide the world’s best end-to-end software supply chain security solution, combining proactive protection against malicious open source, enterprise-grade SBOM management, and the leading open source dependency management platform.

As founders of Nexus Repository and stewards of Maven Central, we are software pioneers. More than 2,000 organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 100 and 15 million software developers, rely on Sonatype to optimize their software supply chains.

About the Role

As an agentic-first Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the design and delivery of enterprise-grade, agentic-first capabilities within Nexus Repository Manager. You will set technical direction for a major product area, orchestrate fleets of agents across parallel workstreams as your primary mode of work, and define the agentic engineering practices that other teams will learn from. You will partner with Principal engineers on critical technical decisions and mentor Senior engineers to deliver capabilities that secure software supply chains at scale.

Why You Will Want to Apply

• Own the architecture of agentic-first features in a product used by 15 million developers and 70% of the Fortune 100.
• Practice long-running, multi-agent development alongside Staff and Principal engineers defining the craft.
• Tackle challenges at the intersection of AI, distributed systems, and software supply chain security.
• Shape the technical roadmap for Nexus, set the engineering hiring bar, and mentor Senior engineers.

What You Will Do

• Architect & Lead With Agents: Drive technical design of major agentic-first subsystems (service architecture, data models, agent/tool integrations) using long-running, multi-agent workflows across decomposition, orchestration, implementation, testing, and review.
• Own a Product Area: Lead major initiatives from ambiguous problem statements through technical design, multi-team execution, rollout, and long-term operability.
• Verification Over Generation: Focus on direction, review, and engineering taste. Define the evals, harnesses, guardrails, and review rituals to confidently ship code generated by agents.
• Define the Practice: Establish how Sonatype engineers work with agents by shaping playbooks, internal tooling, and rituals while training Senior engineers.
• Architecture, Security & Reliability: Own non-functional requirements including performance, reliability, and security (malicious packages, dependency confusion, provenance, SBOM accuracy).
• Cross-functional Leadership: Collaborate with Product, Security Research, UX, and Support leaders to translate customer needs into robust technical plans.

Who You Are

• Long-running Agentic Developer: Multi-step, long-running agent workflows are your default mode of building software beyond autocomplete tools.
• Multi-agent Orchestration: Hands-on experience designing and running multi-agent systems (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor background agents, MCP tooling, custom orchestrators, LangGraph) with robust eval harnesses.
• Verification-first Mindset: Strong emphasis on evals, test harnesses, observability, and review workflows for machine-generated code.
• Staff-level Engineering Skills: 7+ years of professional software development experience leading multi-quarter technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or services.
• Deep Technical Foundation: Strong experience with Java, Cloud infrastructure (AWS / Azure / GCP), and large-scale distributed systems.
• DevSecOps & Supply Chain Depth: Working knowledge of SBOM formats (CycloneDX, SPDX), SCA, SLSA provenance, Sigstore/cosign, and vulnerability analysis (OSV, NVD).
• Product Engineering Mindset: Ability to make independent product and architectural trade-offs without constant supervision.

Benefits & Recognition

• Parental leave policy
• Paid Volunteer Time Off (VTO)
• Flexible working practices
• Diversity & Inclusion working groups