Head of Search

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.

Why this job is exciting

As Head of Search, your leadership and your technical expertise will help propel Sourcegraph to become the “Google of Code Search”.

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.

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.

Code Search is similar in many ways to other kinds of search, so as Head of Search, you will need to build a variety of systems, many of which are systems that you yourself may already know we need, and are not listed here. But 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).

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.

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.

You will work closely with other Engineering department heads on cross-functional initiatives that touch Search in some way. 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. 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.

As a senior leader at Sourcegraph, you will champion customer engagement in all phases of design, development and deployment. 

About you 

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.

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, 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

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, we are working hard to make our compensation ranges visible across the board. 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.  

The target compensation for this role is $235,830 USD 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.

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!

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

• [30m] Recruiter Screen 
• [30m] 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] Peer Interview
• [60m] Technical Interview
• [60m] Cross-functional Team Collaboration 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 - Head of Engineering
• [30m] Leadership Interview - CEO & Co-Founder
  

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.