Head of Search

About Sourcegraph

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.

The Position

Why this job is exciting

Sourcegraph is fundamentally a big data problem, from indexing multi-terabyte monorepos and storing/serving the source-code metadata artifacts we generate from those repos, to indexing clusters of hundreds of thousands of repos and providing fast, high-quality ranking across them. You will be treating code search as a big data problem.

As Head of Search, your leadership and your technical expertise will help propel Sourcegraph to become the “Google of Code Search”. Your team consists of high-agency, self-directed teammates, so you will have ample opportunity to dive in and be deeply technically involved yourself. Your extensive experience in high-scale sharded-computation “shards and mixers” architectures will help us define the scalability story for our search engine, as search consumes ever more resources in the pursuit of perfect result relevance for the largest code bases in the world.

Within one month, you will…

• Take responsibility for a distributed, FAANG-bar team of roughly a dozen engineers, and lead them as a front-line manager while we become the Google of Code Search. Your organization will grow as the company grows.
• Work closely with other Engineering department heads on cross-functional initiatives that touch Search in some way.

Within three months, you will…

• Identify any gaps you see in the Engineering org and help address them in an appropriate way, bringing prior experience to bear in recommending and driving solutions.
• Build a variety of systems, many of which are systems that you yourself may already know we need, and are not listed here. A few examples include a search quality measurement and reporting system, a custom model training pipeline for ML-based code search, and a set of reference architectures for running global ranking computations on the most common enterprise topologies (e.g. spark, k8s, hadoop).

Within six months, you will…

• Champion customer engagement in all phases of design, development and deployment.

Within one year, you will…

• Have hired and retained exceptional people to make our team even more representative of the world’s population.
• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to develop the next set of ambitious goals that your org should work towards.
• Develop a clear technical and execution strategy to achieve that next set of goals.

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.

Level

This job is an M4. You can read more about our job leveling philosophy in our Handbook -> https://handbook.sourcegraph.com/benefits-pay-perks/pay-expenses/compensation/leveling-guide/

Not sure if this is you?

We want a diverse, global team, with a broad range of experience and perspectives. If this job sounds great, but you’re not sure if you qualify, apply anyway! We carefully consider every application, and will either move forward with you, find another team that might be a better fit, keep in touch for future opportunities, or thank you for your time.

Requirements

As Head of Search, you have personal domain expertise with mapreduce-family offline/batch computations, data representations, and modern best practices with data pipelines, data lakes, and performance tuning data representations on at least one of AWS/GCP/Azure and at least one commonly used stack (for instance Spark, Hadoop, BigQuery).

You have experience dealing with customers with very high technical bars of their own, and you can have serious technical conversations with CTOs, Heads of Engineering, and decision makers in companies in every business sector. You can represent your team with customers, roughly as if you were a rotation engineer on that team. And as a senior engineering leader at Sourcegraph, your broad industry experience will be valuable across departments, from the data source (repo management) through the indexing, processing, and api serving in all our deployment environments.

Code Search improves with better ranking–that is, showing the right results to the right users at the right time. Your prior experience with measuring and improving search result relevance, combined with the new tech you and your team will build on a variety of platforms, will help Sourcegraph lead the industry in search quality and sustain that lead in the years to come.

Qualifications:

• You have at least 4 years of management experience and 5 years of hands-on coding experience.
• You have relevant domain knowledge and experience in one or more of the following areas: search, indexing, information retrieval, and relevance.
• You have led engineering teams and have held a high technical bar for teammates as well as yourself.

Nice to haves:

• You have worked with search quality
• You have experience with machine learning

Our Hiring Process

Below is the interview process you can expect for this role (you can read more about the types of interviews in our Handbook -> https://handbook.sourcegraph.com/talent/types_of_interviews).

It may look like a lot of steps, but rest assured that we move quickly and the steps are designed to help you get the information needed to determine if we’re the right fit for you… Interviewing is a two-way street, after all!

Introduction Stage - we have initial conversations to get to know you better…

• [30m] Recruiter Screen
• [60m] Hiring Manager Screen
• [60m] Resume Deep Dive

Team Interview Stage - we then delve into your experience in more depth and introduce you to members of the team…

• [60m] Technical Interview
• [60m] Cross-functional Team Collaboration Interview
• [60m] Peer Interview

Final Interview Stage - we move you to our final round, where you meet cross-functional partners and gain a better understanding of our business and values holistically…

• [30m] Values Interview
• [30m] Leadership Interview
• We check references and make you an offer!

And that’s it! Please note - you are welcome to request additional conversations with anyone you would like to meet, but didn’t get to meet during the interview process.

Benefits

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 $235,830 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.

Perks

The perks outlined in this section are available to all teammates, regardless of the country they’re based in.

• 🏡 All remote. We are an all-remote team so you have flexible work hours, work with the best people worldwide, and never waste time commuting. We give you a budget to work from a coworking space and a budget to set up your home office.
• 🏖️ Flexible PTO. We have a flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) policy with mandatory 30-day annual vacation time that encourages our team to recharge when they need to. Take more if you need it! Read more about our philosophy on mandatory vacation time and PTO.
• 🏃 Wellness. A healthy mind and body is imperative to doing your best work and living a healthy life. We offer a $100 monthly wellness stipend that can be used at your discretion.
• 👪 Family planning support. We value and support teammates at all stages of life. We ensure that all teammates are afforded at least 16 weeks of paid parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child (Sourcegraph will bridge any gap of unpaid parental leave, so coverage details vary by location), and a reimbursement of up to $25,000 USD for family planning services (including but not limited to adoption, IVF, egg/sperm freezing, surrogacy, fertility hormone testing, morning after pill, abortion services, etc). Receipts for any expense over $25 are required.
• 📚 Professional development. In addition to on-the-job training, we offer a $1,000 yearly reimbursement for educational opportunities (such as courses, extended education, books, conferences, etc.). We also hold detailed, twice annual 360 degree Impact review cycles for all teammates. Receipts for any expense over $25 are required.
• ✈️ Travel. We have generous travel budgets to encourage you to connect face to face with your teammates regularly.
• 🌐 Internet. Your paycheck automatically includes a fixed reimbursement for $50 of internet expenses monthly.
• 📱 Mobile phone. Your paycheck automatically includes a fixed reimbursement for $75 of mobile phone expenses monthly.
• 🎧 Desk set-up. We want to ensure all teammates have a workspace that will make them comfortable and productive, so we offer a $2,000 desk set-up budget for all full-time teammates to provide them with any necessary equipment to make that possible. Receipts for any expense over $25 are required. The budget does not expire and can be used at any point in time during your tenure at Sourcegraph.
• 🏢 Co-working space. We offer our teammates a $300–500 monthly budget to join a coworking space. Our intention is not for teammates to use this budget to rent set/permanent office spaces, but rather to have an alternative, flexible space from which to work if and when they may not be able to work from their homes productively. With the wide variety of coworking spaces and options available throughout the world, we ask that teammates stick to options within this budget, including all amenities and parking—teammates absorb any additional cost for more expensive options, locations and/or amenities, such as private offices within coworking spaces, which are often not necessary. We also encourage teammates to consider coworking spaces where subscriptions include access to their spaces in various locations, particularly for teammates who enjoy traveling. If your circumstances are exceptional and require spend outside of this budget, feel free to reach out to the PeopleOps team. Receipts for any expense over $25 are required.
• 🚚 Moving help. Whether you are relocating to join us or simply moving to a new place after you have already joined, we offer a yearly $1,000 reimbursement for hiring professional movers to reduce the stress associated with moving. Should you choose to move yourself, you may use this reimbursement for purchasing/renting moving boxes, packing materials, and if needed, a moving van/truck. Receipts for any expense over $25 are required.

Benefits

The benefits outlined in this section are currently only available to US-based teammates. You can read more about our benefits here. All benefits go into effect on day 1 of employment.

• 🏥 Medical. We offer high-quality medical, dental, and vision care for all US-based full-time employees and their dependents. Sourcegraph covers 100% of premiums for medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents (for US-based full-time employees).
• 🏥 Life insurance. We offer basic life insurance and cover the full premium for all US-based full-time employees.
• 🏦 401(k). We offer a 401(k) for US-based employees with both traditional (pre-tax) and Roth options to help you save for retirement while saving on taxes. The 401(k) is administered by Human Interest and has several low-fee Vanguard funds available as investment options.