Research Engineer

About the role

Who is Sonar?

Sonar enables organizations to ship agentic code with confidence. Code creation is abundant, but confidence is scarce. Our core platform, SonarQube, verifies over 750 billion lines of code every day, delivering agentic verification and governance for all code. Trusted by more than 7 million developers and 75% of the Fortune 100, including teams at Nvidia, ServiceNow, Booking.com, Goldman Sachs, AstraZeneca, and Ford Motor Company, Sonar enables organizations to reduce outages, improve security, and lower the cost and risk of agentic software development.

Founded in Geneva and now headquartered in Austin, Texas, Sonar has a global team working across offices and hubs, including Silicon Valley, London, Bochum, Barcelona, Singapore, Tokyo, and the Washington, D.C. area. At Sonar, we’re enabling enterprises to build agentic software factories that can move quickly while maintaining the control, consistency and evidence required to ship with confidence.

Position description

At Sonar, we are seeking an innovative Research Engineer to join our Data & Agentic team and pioneer the next generation of our code analysis and verification engines. You will be at the forefront of applying cutting-edge AI, advanced agentic workflow and static analysis techniques to complex source code. Your work will directly shape our core products—ensuring both AI-generated and developer-written code meets rigorous enterprise quality and security standards. If you are driven to turn state-of-the-art research into practical, high-impact solutions, this is the role for you.

What you will do - Create & Innovate: Actively participate in the conceptualization phase. Brainstorm novel ways to improve our products and provide immediate, practical feedback to steer exploratory research toward paths that are both impactful and engineering-feasible.

- Develop Agentic Workflows: Design, prototype, and validate intelligent agentic systems and automated workflows that facilitate writing clean code, identifying root causes of system issues, and remediating complex bugs and vulnerabilities.

- Develop Pragmatic Prototypes: Build hands-on prototypes that prove the viability and scalability of research concepts. Proactively identify engineering bottlenecks or scalability limits and propose effective mitigations early in the research phase.

- Evaluate & Benchmark: Drive the rigorous evaluation of new product features. Construct high-quality datasets, define relevant success metrics, and implement comprehensive benchmarks leveraging Sonar’s existing IP alongside third-party and open-source AI tools.

- Engineer Data Pipelines: Build and manage robust data pipelines to gather, process, and version massive code-centric datasets required for training and evaluating specialized models at scale.

- Translate Prototypes to Products: Collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to integrate successful prototypes into Sonar's cutting-edge products, ensuring they meet the needs of our global user base.