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Staff Software Engineer - Agentic First
SonatypeUS - Remote, United StatesRemotefull_timeVerifiedPosted 27 Apr 2026
About the role
Sonatype is the software supply chain security company. We provide the world’s best end-to-end software supply chain security solution, combining the only proactive protection against malicious open source, the only enterprise grade SBOM management and the leading open source dependency management platform. This empowers enterprises to create and maintain secure, quality, and innovative software at scale.
As founders of Nexus Repository and stewards of Maven Central, the world’s largest repository of Java open-source software, we are software pioneers and our open source expertise is unmatched. We empower innovation with an unparalleled commitment to build faster, safer software and harness AI and data intelligence to mitigate risk, maximize efficiencies, and drive powerful software development.
More than 2,000 organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 100 and 15 million software developers, rely on Sonatype to optimize their software supply chains.
About the Role
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.
What You Will do
- Architect & Lead With Agents: 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.
- Own a Product Area: Take major initiatives from ambiguous problem statements through technical design, multi-team execution, rollout, and long-term operability.
- Verification Over Generation, at Scale: Spend your time on direction, review, and taste rather than line-by-line coding. Define the evals, harnesses, guardrails, and review rituals that let your team confidently ship code no human typed.
- Define the Practice: 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.
- Architecture, Security & Reliability: 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).
- Cross-functional Leadership: 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.
Who You Are
- Long-running Agentic Developer: 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.
- Multi-agent Orchestration at Depth: 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 str
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