Java Senior Software Engineer IDE Extension (fmd)

Overview

Sonar helps prevent code quality and code security issues from reaching production, amplifies developers’ productivity in concert with AI assistants, and improves the developer experience with streamlined workflows. Sonar analyzes all code regardless of who writes it—your internal team, genAI, or third parties—resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable applications. Rooted in the open source community, Sonar’s solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Today Sonar is used by 7M developers and 400K organizations worldwide, including the DoD, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile.

We believe in developing great products supported by great teams and a strong culture. We are highly committed to and obsessed with the company, users, each other, and our open source community. We have high standards and hold each other accountable for acting with positivity, dedication, thoughtfulness, empathy, and passion daily.

We are deliberate with our decisions with high clarity of intention, and we also feel urgency and move forward quickly. We are highly effective and operationally efficient, operating collectively as One Team to accomplish our goals. At Sonar, CODE is more than just an acronym — it’s a mindset that defines daily operations.

Why You Should Apply:

At Sonar we’re a group of brilliant, motivated, and driven professionals working hard to help supercharge developers to build better, faster. Sonar helps to continuously improve code quality and code security while reducing developer toil. This means that developers can focus on doing more of what they love and less of what they don’t. Our solutions don’t just solve symptoms of problems; we help fix issues at the source for all code, whether it’s developer-written, AI-generated, or from third parties.

We have a dynamic culture with employees worldwide and hub offices in the USA, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore, and Germany. Team members should come to work every day, work on a product they are proud of, love what they do, and feel energized by their peers. With roots in the open source community, we’re all about the mission: supercharge developers to build better, faster.

The Impact You Will Have:

Our team owns the external development experiences, including the SonarQube IDE Extensions (VS Code, IntelliJ, Visual Studio) and the Sonar Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. With over 1 million active users, we operate at a scale few developer tools achieve. The tools we build are on the critical path for the world’s most impactful engineering teams, having a tangible high-stakes impact on the global software supply chain.

As a Senior/Staff member of the IDE Experience squad you will define the vision for this hybrid engineering future, architecting an inner loop that anticipates the needs of both human engineers and AI Agents. You will build the critical infrastructure that empowers engineers to move fast, ensuring that all code is born clean and secure before a PR is opened.

What You Will Do Daily

• Build the Real-Time Feedback Loop . Design and implement intelligent guidance systems that proactively steer both developers and AI agents toward secure patterns. Eliminate security flaws and architectural drift before a PR is opened.
• Lead the Technical Evolution . Drive architectural decisions for IDE Extensions and their backend. Manage memory and CPU footprint, provide low-latency responses, and ensure we never block the UI thread to protect the engineers’ flow state.
• Architect the Context Engine for AI Agents . Contribute to the development of the Sonar MCP Server and Sonar CLI, allowing local AI Agents (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude, Code, etc.) to ask for project rules and security context before they generate code.
• Champion a Unified Experience . Ensure our tools feel native in every IDE while sharing a robust logic core. Bridge platform-specific implementations (TypeScript/C#, etc.) and our shared backend (Java) to prevent feature fragmentation across the ecosystem.
• Act as a Technical Force Multiplier . Beyond writing code, mentor the squad through design reviews and collaborate with the Code Quality and Security teams to ensure our static analysis engine runs efficiently in a live local environment.

The Experience You Will Need

• Deep Engineering Foundation . Significant professional experience (typically 7 years) in one of the following ecosystems: Java (JVM internals, IntelliJ Platform UI / Compose), TypeScript (VS Code Extension API), C# (.NET, Visual Studio Extensibility). You are a specialist in one but capable of learning and contributing to the other as needed.
• Systems-Level Thinking . Understand the complexities of asynchronous programming, concurrency, and Inter-Process Communication (IPC). Experience with LSP (Language Server Protocol) and/or MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a plus.
• Product-Minded Engineering . You don’t just take tickets. You are passionate about the impact of your work, proactively bring new ideas to the roadmap, and care about a zero-friction flow.
• Vision for Agentic Coding . Understand that the IDE role is changing and want to build infrastructure that allows AI to be autonomous and safe.
• Collaborative Leadership . Experienced in guiding engineers toward technical excellence and fostering a culture of empathy, continuous learning, and dogfooding our own tools.

Why You Will Love It Here

• Dynamic culture that values respect and kindness and embraces the right to fail and recover quickly.
• People skills are as important as technical skills; we strive to be friendly while staying passionate leaders in our domains.
• Flexible work policy: 3 days in-office and 2 days work-from-home each week for near-office locations; some locations (Dubai, India, Japan, Australia) operate fully remotely.
• Growth mindset with emphasis on continuous education and skill development.
• Products and services are as strong as our internal team members.
• Regular transparency with meetings and updates on growth and success.

Benefits of Working With Sonar

• Pension Scheme: 1st Pillar (Unterstützungskasse) automatic financed by Sonar, 3% of gross salary as an additional benefit.
• Pension Scheme: 2nd Pillar (bAV): Voluntary 15% contribution by Sonar from social security savings.
• 28 PTO days for Geneva-region employees, with additional days based on seniority and circumstances.
• Holidays on working calendar days; if holiday falls on weekend, observed on adjacent weekday.
• Public transport reimbursement of 60% for annual subscription.
• Global workforce with employees in 20 countries and 35 nationalities.
• Annual company-wide kickoff to build relationships and goals.

We Value Diversity, Equity and Inclusion : Sonar believes diversity is a strength. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

Important : All offers of employment are contingent upon the results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date. Applications submitted through agencies or third-party recruiters will not be considered.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

Required Experience: Senior IC

Location : Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany