Applied Machine Learning Scientist

Posted Mar 3

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 is uniquely differentiated by our rich code intelligence data and powerful code search platform. In the world of prompting LLMs, context is everything, 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 experience, and you can help us unlock its full potential.

We are looking for a polyglot AI/ML hacker, versed in programming language semantics, with a strong AI/ML background, who can help us deliver the world’s best coding assistant, built on our 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 code bases in the world, without all the go-to-market hassle you’d encounter in a startup.

You will be a scientist at Sourcegraph Labs doing R&D, and pushing the boundaries of what AI can do, as an IC on our new ML team. You will have the full power of Sourcegraph’s Code Intelligence Platform at your disposal, and you’ll be working on a coding assistant that is already awesome even after just a few weeks of work, so this is a greenfield opportunity to multiply dev productivity to unprecedented levels.

Within one month, you will

  • Start building a trusting relationship with your peers, and learning the company structure.
  • Be set up to do local development, and be actively prototyping.
  • Dive deep into how AI and ML is already used at Sourcegraph and identify ways to improve moving forward.
  • Ship a substantial new feature to end users.

Within three months, you will

  • Be seen as a subject matter expert in all things AI at Sourcegraph.
  • Be contributing actively to the world’s best coding assistant.
  • Be following all the relevant research, and conducting research of your own.

Within six months, you will

  • Be fully ramped up and owning key pieces of the assistant.
  • Be ramped up on other relevant parts of the Sourcegraph product.
  • Be helping design and build what might become the biggest dev accelerator in 20 years.

About you

You are a polyglot hacker in the AI/ML space who wants to be part of 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 near 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 IC4. 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 $190,000 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.