IC5 profile - Code Intelligence Indexing

See also internal profile

Business need

Code Intelligence is a core pillar of Sourcegraph’s product offering, powering both heuristic and compiler accurate code navigation. The area has a standing need for an IC5 profile to own the technical direction and development of the language indexers that power our Precise Code Intel offering at Sourcegraph. The results that these indexers produce are compiler level accurate and are a key differentiator from the competition in our approach to producing semantic navigation. As such, this engineer is expected to carry out and have the following skills and responsibilities:

  • Evaluate and design our approach and philosophy to indexing, balancing:
    • Indexing quality: The indexer produces accurate results for a comprehensive set of language features. The indexer is easy to use for simple environments while flexible enough to support manual configuration for advanced environments.
    • Indexing performance: The indexer analyzes large codebases with minimal CPU, memory and disk footprint.
    • Compatibility with customer codebases: the indexer supports a sufficient breadth of compiler versions and build tools to support the wide variety of environments that our customers use.
  • Deep compiler experience in at least one of our major language ecosystems with a focus on powering IDE-like tools and enabling others in this space.
    • Mentorship: Proactively mentor engineers in the indexing space in compiler and build tool developmental approaches, rigor and techniques.
    • Product opportunities: Identify new opportunities or enhancements that can directly benefit from precise indexing.
    • Evangelize precise code intelligence: Advocate both internally and externally for precise navigation, gaining internal consensus and community excitement. Work closely with leadership to plan feasibility of supporting specific languages including:
    • Competitive-analysis: Analyzing competitive approaches, identifying and summarizing strategic approaches and trade-offs.
    • Roadmap planning: Work closely with the PM to plan and prioritize the indexing roadmap.
    • Team composition: Work closely with the EM to identify skills needed to be developed or hired for based on competitive analysis and business needs. Define and iterate on helping us identify talent in this niche space.