Staff Software Engineer

About the role

At Sonatype, we're building the technology that powers secure software development for thousands of organizations around the world. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll play a key role in developing and maintaining the core services that enable our customers to provision, purchase, and license our products reliably and at scale.

This is a highly strategic and hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys solving and owning complex technical challenges, writing high-quality code, and collaborating with experienced engineers. While this is not a people management position, you'll have opportunities to mentor teammates, share technical expertise, and help elevate engineering best practices across the team.

You'll work closely with a collaborative group of engineers, contributing to the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of critical backend services that support our commercial platform.

What you'll do:

• Design, develop, test, and maintain software that powers product provisioning, licensing, and purchasing capabilities across Sonatype's platform.

• Build scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend services using modern engineering practices.

• Contribute to technical design discussions and help drive high-quality architectural decisions.

• Collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and cross-functional teams to deliver impactful features.

• Write clean, well-tested, and maintainable code while participating in code reviews.

• Troubleshoot production issues and continuously improve system performance, reliability, and scalability.

• Mentor and coach other engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, and knowledge sharing while remaining deeply involved in day-to-day development.

• Contribute to automation, infrastructure improvements, and cloud-native engineering practices.

What success looks like:

• You deliver high-quality, maintainable software that reliably supports Sonatype's provisioning, licensing, and purchasing capabilities.

• You become a trusted technical contributor who proactively solves complex engineering problems.

• You collaborate effectively across engineering teams, helping drive technical excellence and delivering value to customers.

• You mentor and support fellow engineers through thoughtful feedback, technical guidance, and code reviews while remaining a highly productive individual contributor.

• You continuously improve the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of the systems your team owns.

• You embrace ownership, take initiative, and consistently deliver meaningful impact through hands-on software development.

What you'll bring:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience developing production-grade applications.

• Direct experience using agent-driven development and code review.

• Strong experience building backend applications with Java.

• Experience with additional programming languages like Golang and Python.

• Experience working with cloud platforms, particularly AWS.

• Hands-on experience with containerization and infrastructure technologies such as Docker, Terraform, and Ansible.

• Experience with build and dependency management tools such as Maven.

• Experience working with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL.

• Experience with event-driven architectures and microservices.

• Strong understanding of software design principles, testing, debugging, and distributed systems.

• A collaborative mindset with excellent communication skills and a passion for mentoring fellow engineers.

• A desire to remain highly technical and hands-on while contributing technical leadership within the team.

It’d be great if you also had:

• Exposure to Microsoft Azure and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

• Experience building or supporting commercial platforms involving licensing, provisioning, subscription management, or purchasing systems.

• Experience working in Agile development environments.

• Familiarity with DevOps and CI/CD best practices.

Things we are proud of:

• 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Software Supply Chain Security
• 2026 Celebrating 15 Years of Sonatype Research Labs – Industry-leading software supply chain and open source security research
• 2026 Founding Member of the Linux Foundation Initiative for Open Source Sustainability
• 2026 State of the Software Supply Chain® Report – Continuing industry leadership in software supply chain security and AI security research
• 2025 Visionary in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Security Testing!
• 2025 AI Compliance Solution of the Year - AI Breakthrough Awards
• 2025 DEVIES Award to our SBOM Manager for a new product for its innovation and impact in developer technology
• 2024 Industry Leader in Forrester-Wave for Software Composition Analysis (2024 Q4 report)
• Constellation AST Shortlist: Sonatype has been listed on the Constellation ShortList™ for Application Security Testing for 2024
• Data Breakthrough Awards: Sonatype was announced as a 2024 winner in the "Open Source Data Solution of the Year."
• SD Times: Best in Show Security
• Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators 2024
• The Herd Top 100 Private Software Companies 2024
• Diversity & Inclusion Working Groups
• Parental Leave Policy
• Paid Volunteer Time Off (VTO)