Compiler Engineer + SCIP Maintainer [IC4-5]

Hours & location

🌎 While we hire almost anywhere in the world, we have a preference for someone to reside in the following locations for this role. However, if you feel qualified, we welcome you to apply regardless of location. No matter what, working hours must overlap with EST for at least 20 hours/week.

Preferred locations:

• East Coast USA
• Europe

Why this job is exciting

Precise code intelligence is the deterministic ground truth foundational to how the world's most important companies understand their code, and we intend to make it the bedrock for how their AI agents do, too. It is powered by SCIP, the open, language-agnostic protocol for indexing source code that enables go-to-definition, find-references, go-to-implementation, hover documentation, and dependency analysis across repository and language boundaries. SCIP is already emitted by an ecosystem of indexers spanning every major language and consumed by tools well beyond Sourcegraph, Mozilla's Searchfox, rust-analyzer, and Meta's Glean among them.

This is a senior to staff-level role that is equal parts compiler engineering and open-source leadership. Your well-honed compiler and language skills will be put to good use growing SCIP into a thriving, self-sustaining, multi-party open standard. As the deeply technical steward of the SCIP community (https://scip-code.org), you'll be shaping governance and the roadmap by owning the protocol with its indexer ecosystem, reviewing and mentoring contributors, setting the bar for quality, driving alignment across organizations like Meta, Uber, Mozilla, and Stripe who already run these indexers in production, and helping to set Sourcegraph's product direction for code intel. Your compiler and language expertise is what earns you the credibility to lead that community and make the right calls about the protocol's evolution; your judgment about which problems are worth solving will make you a force multiplier across the company.

You'll do this on a small, high-leverage team where you own a wide surface area and have real agency over technical direction. You will become the person the company, our customers, and the broader industry look to as the authority on precise code intelligence. We take a product-in, not technology-out view: precision is non-negotiable, but we pick the best implementation that delivers the behavior customers actually need. And we are unapologetically AI-forward: we believe precise code intelligence is one of the most valuable substrates for making AI agents measurably better, and you'll define what that looks like, from AI-assisted indexer setup to grounding agents in verifiable facts about code.

📅 Within one month, you will…

• Get to know your team and its processes, get the SCIP toolchain running end-to-end, and land your first fixes and improvements across the indexer and protocol repos.
• Build a clear picture of the health of the SCIP ecosystem - the open issue long tail, the most-relied-upon indexers, where external partners are already invested - and form an early point of view on where the standard should head.
• Join the team's on-call support rotation.

📅 Within three months, you will…

• Own SCIP governance and community direction: triage and prioritization norms, contribution guidelines, and how the project sets and communicates its roadmap.
• Set the technical direction for the protocol and its indexers, confidently making calls that require real compiler fluency - language-feature support, AST-modifying tools, symbol-resolution correctness - that become the examples others follow.
• Deepen relationships with the partner organizations invested in SCIP, driving external alignment that advances both the standard and Sourcegraph's business.

📅 Within six months, you will…

• Have grown SCIP into a healthier, more active multi-party open ecosystem - more contributors, more engaged partners, and a higher, more consistent quality bar across indexers - recognized across the industry as the steward who steers it.
• Shape Sourcegraph's company-level bets where precise code intelligence intersects AI: how precise data grounds agents, how agents can help stand up and maintain indexers, and how the protocol should evolve to serve both humans and models.
• Be the person the company, our customers, and the broader community look to as the definitive authority on SCIP and precise code intelligence, influencing our overall technical direction well beyond the team.

About you 

You are a senior to staff-level open-source standard-bearer with credible compiler and language fluency. You're energized by growing a community and a standard, not just shipping your own commits, and you have enough language and compiler depth to be taken seriously by the people who build indexers and compilers for a living.

• You have credible compiler and language fluency. You're comfortable enough in the guts of a compiler or language toolchain to make sound calls about the protocol and its indexers and to earn the trust of people who do this for a living. You should feel at home diving into any of the codebases and toolset this role touches: tracking Java/Kotlin compiler churn, supporting AST-modifying tools like Lombok, working with Sorbet for Ruby, build-system integration (Gradle/Maven/Bazel), tree-sitter-based indexing, and the C++/clang and Go indexers. The day-to-day is applied indexer work and judgment (increasingly agent-assisted) not compiler R&D, and you relish picking up an unfamiliar toolchain.
• You operate at staff scope and are comfortable with broad direction. You bring conviction about which problems are worth solving, make high-stakes calls under ambiguity, and provide solutions that become the examples others follow.
• You're genuinely AI-forward. You're excited about precise code intelligence as a deterministic substrate that makes AI agents better, and about coaching coding agents on the grunt work of building, refreshing, and maintaining indexers. This is core to where we're taking the team and the company, so it should genuinely energize you.
• You're pragmatic, not perfectionist. You take a product-in view, ship the smallest correct thing, and retool incrementally rather than reaching for rewrites. You hold precision as non-negotiable while being flexible about how you get there.
• You communicate with authority in the open. Much of this role plays out in public: issues, RFCs, design discussions, partner and executive conversations. You write clearly and represent the project (and Sourcegraph) as a credible technical leader to an external technical audience.
• You've led open source, not just contributed to it. You've grown a meaningful project or standard into a multi-party community. You've set governance and roadmap, triaged and reviewed. You've mentored contributors, and you have grown the set of people who carry the work. You've driven alignment across independent organizations with their own interests, and you measure success by the health of the ecosystem, not the size of your own diff.

Nice to haves:

• Experience creating or leading a developer tool or standard consumed across many organizations (an indexer, language server, build tool, protocol, or similar).
• Familiarity with code-intelligence formats and tooling: SCIP, LSIF, LSP, tree-sitter, rust-analyzer, or comparable ecosystems.
• Experience partnering with large engineering organizations (e.g., FAANG-scale dev-infra teams) as co-maintainers or standard-setters.
• Willingness to learn Go, which our backend is written in.

Level

📊 This job is an IC4-IC5.  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. As an open and transparent company that values competitive compensation, our compensation ranges are visible to every single Sourcegraph teammate.

Your salary is determined by your pay band for the specific job level. For determining pay bands, we use a number of market and data-driven salary sources, along with your location zone, and target the high-end of the range to ensure we’re always paying above market regardless of where you live in the world. Both U.S. and international locations are divided into one of four zones, determined by the cost of labor index for each area. The salary for a successful candidate will be based on level, job-related skills, experience, qualifications, and location zone. Please note that the salaries below may be adjusted in the future.

💰 The target compensation for this role is based on the pay bands for your zone.

The start of the IC5 pay band for each zone is listed below:

• Zone 2: $192,000 USD
• Zone 3: $144,000 USD
• Zone 4: $96,000 USD

The start of the IC4 pay band for each zone is listed below:

• Zone 2: $172,000 USD
• Zone 3: $129,000 USD
• Zone 4: $86,000 USD

Please speak with a recruiter for additional information regarding zone locations.

📈 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.

Interview process 

Below is the interview process you can expect for this role (you can read more about the types of interviews in our Handbook). 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! 

We expect the interview process to take 4.75 hours in total.

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

• [30m] Recruiter Screen
• [45m] Hiring Manager Screen / Resume Deep Dive

🧑‍💻 Team Interview Stage - we then delve into your experience in more depth and introduce you to members of the team, including cross-functional partners…

• [60m] Technical Interview
• [60m] Technical Interview
• [60m] Cross-functional team collaboration / Values

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

• [30] Leadership
• We check references and conduct your background check

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.