Egnyte, the $1.5 billion cloud content governance company, has embedded AI coding tools across its global team of more than 350 developers — but not to reduce headcount. Instead, the company continues to hire junior engineers, using AI to accelerate onboarding, deepen codebase understanding, and shorten the path from junior to senior contributor. The approach challenges a dominant 2025 narrative that automation will replace developers, showing instead how enterprises are using AI to scale engineering capacity while keeping humans firmly in the loop.“To have engineers disappear or us not hiring junior engineers doesn’t look like the likely outcome,” Amrit Jassal, Egnyte CTO and co-founder, told VentureBeat. “You’ve got to have people, you’re training and doing all types of succession planning. The junior engineer of today is the senior engineer of tomorrow.”How Egnyte coders are using AI — without ceding controlEgnyte — which has more than 22,000 users including NASDAQ, Red Bull, and BuzzFeed — has rolled out Claude Code, Cursor, Augment, and Gemini CLI coding tools across its developer base to support its core business strategies and expand its newer AI offerings like customer-facing copilots and customizable AI agents. Devs use these tools across a variety of tasks, the simplest of which include data retrieval, code comprehension, smart search, and code lookup. Egnyte’s code base has lots of Java code, which uses numerous libraries, each with different versions, Jassal explained. AI tools are great for peer-to-peer programming, helping new users get a lay of the land, or existing users probe into different code repositories. “We have a pretty big code base, right?” Jassal said. “Let’s say you’re looking at an iOS application, but you’re not well versed; yo …
