Staff Software Engineer - Agentic First

Sonatype

About The Position

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'll 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'll partner with Principal engineers on the hardest technical decisions and mentor Senior engineers to deliver capabilities that help enterprises secure their software supply chains at massive 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 a fundamentally new way of building software — long-running, multi-agent development — alongside Staff and Principal engineers who are defining the craft. Work on the hardest problems at the intersection of AI, distributed systems, and software supply chain security — a space where the industry playbook is still being written. Shape the technical roadmap for Nexus, set the engineering hiring bar, and mentor Senior engineers who will carry the craft forward.

Requirements

Multi-step, long-running agent workflows are your default way of building software — well beyond Copilot-style autocomplete. You routinely orchestrate fleets of agents in parallel across planning, coding, testing, and review, and your own time is spent on direction, verification, and taste rather than generation.
Hands-on experience designing, running, and scaling multi-agent systems (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor background agents, custom orchestrators, LangGraph-style graphs) — including MCP tooling, shared context and memory, agent handoffs, and robust eval harnesses. You've shipped production work this way and have strong opinions on what holds up at scale.
You've internalized that the new leverage point is human judgment over machine generation. You define the evals, test harnesses, observability, and review workflows that let a team confidently ship code no one personally typed.
You don't just adopt agentic workflows — you define them. You've led internal rollouts, published, open-sourced, or otherwise pushed the state of the art on how engineers work alongside agents, and have a clear point of view on where the craft is heading.
Half product, half engineering. You make product decisions independently and drive scope, trade-offs, and sequencing without constant PM hand-holding.
You want to build mission-critical products that drive revenue and transform how customers build software.
7+ years of professional software development, with a track record of leading multi-quarter technical initiatives that span multiple teams or services.
Strong experience with Java, Cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP), and large-scale distributed systems — including performance tuning, data-intensive services, and production operability at scale.
Working knowledge of software supply chain security — SBOM formats (CycloneDX, SPDX), SCA, SLSA provenance, Sigstore/cosign signing, vulnerability analysis (OSV, NVD), and common attack patterns against package ecosystems.
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.

Responsibilities

Drive the technical design of major agentic-first subsystems — service architecture, data models, and agent/tool integrations — by running long-running, multi-agent workflows across decomposition, orchestration, implementation, testing, and review.
Take 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 your team confidently ship code no human typed.
Set the bar for how Sonatype engineers work with agents. Shape internal playbooks, tooling, and rituals; train Senior engineers in the craft; and raise the ceiling on what's possible.
Own non-functional requirements for your area — performance, reliability, and security — with particular attention to software supply chain threats (malicious packages, dependency confusion, provenance, SBOM accuracy).
Partner with Product, Security Research, UX, and Support leaders to translate ambiguous customer needs into concrete, shippable technical plans; conduct deep design reviews; and raise the quality bar through thoughtful mentorship.