Inside Sourcegraph’s Engineering Culture: Part 1

A deep dive into how Sourcegraph works from the perspective of software engineers and engineering managers.

Mar 14, 2023

∙ Paid

Sourcegraph is a code search scaleup, cofounded in 2013 by Quinn Slack (CEO) and Beyang Liu (CTO.) The company first raised major venture capital funding in 2017 with a $20M Series A round. It has since raised a further $223M across 4 rounds, according to Dealroom, the latest being a $125M Series D in 2021.

I first came across Sourcegraph while at Uber in 2018. The tool was introduced internally and rapidly made it much easier to explore codebases and returned search results surprisingly fast. I’ve followed the company’s journey since. We’ve previously covered in-depth how Sourcegraph does RFCs (Requests For Comments,) as part of an examination of Design docs, RFCs and ADRs.

Sourcegraph stands out from many tech companies by applying high transparency to everything it does. This made me keen to discover any learnings that this approach may offer by going through everything shared publicly – and also a few things not in the open.

To do this, I’ve spent weeks in contact with current and former Sourcegraph engineers and on examining publicly available sources. I also talked with Quinn for some CEO insights.

As with other deep dives on Facebook/Meta and Amazon, this issue is longer than usual. You might consider treating it as an educational resource for future reference.

In this article, we cover:

1. Introduction

2. Getting things done

3. Hiring

Part 2 of the series additionally covers:

4. Compensation