Staff Software Engineer - Agentic First

About the role

Sonatype is seeking an agentic-first Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of enterprise-grade, agentic-first capabilities within Nexus Repository Manager. The successful candidate will set technical direction for a major product area, orchestrate fleets of agents across parallel workstreams, and define the agentic engineering practices that other teams will learn from.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead the technical design of major agentic-first subsystems, including service architecture, data models, and agent/tool integrations
• Own a product area, taking major initiatives from ambiguous problem statements through technical design, multi-team execution, rollout, and long-term operability
• Define the evals, harnesses, guardrails, and review rituals that let the team confidently ship code no human typed
• Set the bar for how Sonatype engineers work with agents, shaping internal playbooks, tooling, and rituals, and training Senior engineers in the craft
• Own non-functional requirements for the area, including performance, reliability, and security, with particular attention to software supply chain threats
• Partner with Product, Security Research, UX, and Support leaders to translate ambiguous customer needs into concrete, shippable technical plans

Requirements

• Long-running agentic developer with experience designing, running, and scaling multi-agent systems
• Hands-on experience with multi-agent orchestration, including MCP tooling, shared context and memory, agent handoffs, and robust eval harnesses
• Verification-first mindset, with a focus on human judgment over machine generation
• Ability to shape leading-edge practice, having led internal rollouts, published, open-sourced, or otherwise pushed the state of the art on how engineers work alongside agents
• Product engineering mindset, making product decisions independently and driving scope, trade-offs, and sequencing without constant PM hand-holding
• Staff-level engineering skills, with 7+ years of professional software development experience and a track record of leading multi-quarter technical initiatives
• Deep technical foundation, with strong experience with Java, Cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP), and large-scale distributed systems
• Working knowledge of software supply chain security, including SBOM formats, SCA, SLSA provenance, Sigstore/cosign signing, vulnerability analysis, and common attack patterns against package ecosystems

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 innovation and impact in developer technology
• 2024 Industry Leader in Forrester-Wave for Software Composition Analysis
• Constellation AST Shortlist: Sonatype has been listed on the Constellation ShortList for Application Security Testing
• 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

Benefits

• Diversity and inclusion working groups
• Parental leave policy
• Paid Volunteer Time Off (VTO)
• Flexible working practices to allow employees to show up as their whole selves