Egnyte, the $1.5 billion cloud content material governance firm, has embedded AI coding instruments throughout its international crew of greater than 350 builders — however to not cut back headcount. As an alternative, the corporate continues to rent junior engineers, utilizing AI to speed up onboarding, deepen codebase understanding, and shorten the trail from junior to senior contributor.
The strategy challenges a dominant 2025 narrative that automation will exchange builders, displaying as a substitute how enterprises are utilizing AI to scale engineering capability whereas protecting people firmly within the loop.
“To have engineers disappear or us not hiring junior engineers doesn't appear to be the possible consequence,” Amrit Jassal, Egnyte CTO and co-founder, advised VentureBeat. “You've received to have folks, you're coaching and doing all kinds of succession planning. The junior engineer of in the present day is the senior engineer of tomorrow.”
How Egnyte coders are utilizing AI — with out ceding management
Egnyte — which has greater than 22,000 customers together with NASDAQ, Purple Bull, and BuzzFeed — has rolled out Claude Code, Cursor, Increase, and Gemini CLI coding instruments throughout its developer base to assist its core enterprise methods and broaden its newer AI choices like customer-facing copilots and customizable AI brokers.
Devs use these instruments throughout a wide range of duties, the only of which embody knowledge retrieval, code comprehension, good search, and code lookup. Egnyte’s code base has a lot of Java code, which makes use of quite a few libraries, every with totally different variations, Jassal defined. AI instruments are nice for peer-to-peer programming, serving to new customers get a lay of the land, or current customers probe into totally different code repositories.
“We’ve got a reasonably large code base, proper?” Jassal stated. “Let's say you're an iOS utility, however you're not properly versed; you’ll hearth up Google CLI or an Increase, and ask it to find the code base.”
Some Egnyte devs are transferring into automated pull request summaries, which give easy overviews of code modifications that primarily clarify the “what,” “how,” and “why” of proposed modifications.
“However clearly, any change that's made, we don't need to hear that AI made the change; it needs to be that developer made the change,” Jassal identified. “I might not belief AI to decide to the manufacturing code base.”
Commits nonetheless cross by means of human assessment and safety validation, and something red-flagged is escalated to senior engineers. Devs are warned of the risks of settling into autopilot mode or blindly trusting code. A mannequin might not have been uncovered to, or given sufficient samples of, sure coding elements and infrastructure in its coaching.
One other rising, and carefully monitored, use case for AI is unit testing, the place code elements are run in isolation to make sure they work as meant. “On the finish of the day, it’s a productiveness enchancment software,” he stated. “It’s actually a continuation, it's like another software, it's not some magic.”
Past core engineering, AI helps different groups collaborate with programmers. Product administration, as an example, is utilizing instruments like Vercel to convey “demo-worthy” prototypes, relatively than simply concepts, to devs, who can then transfer forward with mock-ups. Or, if UX groups need to change sure components on a dashboard, AI can rapidly spin up a handful of choices, like totally different widgets or buttons.
“Then you definately come to engineering with that, and the engineer instantly is aware of what you actually intend to do with it,” Jassal stated.
Setting expectations, assembly devs the place they’re
Nevertheless, day-to-day actions for all Egnyte engineers, together with junior builders, prolong past simply coding.
Junior builders are given hands-on duties throughout the complete growth lifecycle to speed up their development and expertise, Jassal stated. For example, they help with requirement evaluation in early software program engineering phases, in addition to deployment, productization and post-deployment upkeep.
In flip, these actions require “Egnyte-specific tacit information and expertise” provided by senior engineers. One clear instance of labor that sits firmly with senior engineers is authoring structure notes, as these lower throughout the platform and require a extra holistic, system-level view, Jassal stated.
“Lots of the conventional roadblocks are navigated sooner nowadays with AI; for instance, understanding the codebase, dissecting necessities, auto-testing,” he stated. “This sooner monitor permits our proficient junior hires to progress extra rapidly and supply increased worth to the corporate sooner.”
The corporate expects a a lot sooner studying curve from junior to mid-level engineers, Jassal stated. “It's at all times the case that folks coming straight into the workforce are far more enthusiastic about making an attempt new issues,” Jassal stated. However that needs to be coloured with actuality to mood expectations, he added.
Alternatively, some senior engineers might should be ramped up of their adoption as a result of they’re hesitant or had ho-hum or unhealthy experiences with earlier era instruments. This requires incremental introduction.
“The senior folks, having been burnt a number of occasions, convey that perspective,” he stated. "So each [types of engineers] play an essential position.”
Hiring will proceed for scale and contemporary perspective
“Generally, I might say it has been actually hyped by of us who need to promote you tokens,” Jassal stated referring to individuals who discuss human coders changing into out of date.
"Vibe coding" may very well be construed in an analogous vein: Like others in software program growth, he prefers the time period “AI assisted coding,” whereby programmers have a self-driven loop, producing code, analyzing exceptions, then correcting and scaling.
No less than in Egnyte’s case, hiring will proceed, even when at a slower clip as folks change into extra productive due to AI, Jassal stated.
“We’re not simply hiring for scale, however to develop the subsequent era of senior builders and inject contemporary views into our growth practices,” he stated.
The takeaway for technical decision-makers just isn’t that AI will get rid of engineering jobs — however that it’s going to reshape how expertise is developed.
At Egnyte, AI-assisted coding is compressing studying curves and elevating expectations, not eradicating people from the method. Enterprises that deal with AI as a alternative threat hollowing out their future senior expertise pipeline; those who deal with it as infrastructure can transfer sooner with out shedding the judgment, creativity, and accountability that solely engineers present.
