[Hiring] Staff Forward Deployed Engineer @GitLab

Role Description

GitLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering team is a field-situated product engineering function focused on strategic customer outcomes, artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, and direct contributions to GitLab’s product. This isn't a traditional field engineering, solutions architecture, or professional services role. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work closely with customers while maintaining the technical standards and contribution discipline of a Staff-level product engineer.

You'll work where strategic customer urgency, complex technical ambiguity, and GitLab product execution intersect. You'll partner directly with strategic customers and teams across:

• Product
• Engineering
• Support
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Solutions Architecture (SA)
• Customer Success Architecture (CSA)
• Customer Success Management (CSM)
• Professional Services

You'll diagnose and resolve high-impact adoption blockers, contribute production-quality fixes and features, and turn what you learn into repeatable patterns for GitLab and its customers.

What you’ll do

• Product contribution:
  • Contribute production-quality code to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.
  • Develop bug fixes, features, integrations, tooling, and performance improvements when strategic customer outcomes require direct engineering work.
  • Work within GitLab’s product and engineering processes, including issue discovery, merge request creation, testing, review, documentation, and maintainability.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering so customer-driven solutions support long-term product direction rather than becoming one-off customizations.
  • Turn blockers discovered in the field into durable product improvements, reference architectures, documentation, and repeatable implementation patterns.
• Strategic technical stewardship:
  • Engage with strategically important customers when adoption, retention, executive confidence, or public trust is materially at risk.
  • Diagnose complex problems across GitLab product behavior, customer architecture, Git internals, CI/CD workflows, API usage, observability, infrastructure, networking, and cloud environments.
  • Coordinate across Product, Engineering, SRE, Support, SA, CSA, CSM, Professional Services, and customer technical teams to drive resolution from discovery through handoff.
  • Provide recommendations grounded in data, traces, and systems analysis to improve GitLab usage, workflows, automation, and architecture.
  • Create durable outcomes without establishing permanent dependency on Forward Deployed Engineering.
• AI adoption and agentic software development lifecycle:
  • Drive governed, measurable, and production-oriented adoption of GitLab Duo Agent Platform with strategic customers.
  • Identify and resolve AI adoption blockers involving governance, usage controls, auditability, security, compliance, operating models, workflow design, and integrations.
  • Develop customer-safe adoption patterns for the agentic software development lifecycle (SDLC), AI-assisted development, intent-based review, AI governance, and human-in-the-loop software delivery.
  • Partner with Product, Engineering, Field, and Customer Success teams to turn AI adoption learning into reusable guidance and product improvements.
• Thought leadership:
  • Create technical narratives grounded in customer experience and product reality that can help shape the industry’s approach.
  • Contribute to Well-Architected Frameworks, whitepapers, webinars, reference architectures, technical strategy memos, and adoption frameworks.
  • Guide ideas through discovery, formulation, validation, amplification, and adoption across GitLab.
  • Partner with SA, CSA, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Product Marketing Management, CSM, Support, and executive stakeholders to make technical thought leadership a shared company capability.

Qualifications

• Staff-level experience building, operating, or improving complex production software systems.
• Experience contributing to large, mature product codebases with high standards for testing, maintainability, performance, and security.
• Strong Ruby on Rails or Go experience and the ability to contribute directly to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.
• Experience with AI-assisted software development, agentic workflows, AI governance, model evaluation, context management, prompt and workflow design, or AI adoption in enterprise environments.
• Experience diagnosing complex system behavior across application code, data stores, infrastructure, observability, networking, APIs, and customer usage patterns.
• Deep knowledge of modern DevSecOps workflows, including Git, merge requests, CI/CD, security controls, compliance needs, and enterprise software delivery.
• Experience working with strategic customers or senior technical stakeholders in ambiguous, high-impact situations.
• The ability to coordinate across product, engineering, field, and customer teams without formal authority.
• Strong written communication and sound judgment, including the ability to create technical narratives and distinguish reusable product work from customer-specific customization.

Strongly preferred qualifications

• Direct experience with GitLab as a platform, including GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, or GitLab Self-Managed.
• Production experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Vue, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, or observability tools.
• Deep familiarity with Git internals, repository performance, large-scale Git usage patterns, or GitLab Runner behavior.
• Experience creating technical thought-leadership materials, such as whitepapers, technical talks, architecture frameworks, requests for comments, public technical writing, or internal strategy documents.
• A background in performance engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems.
• Experience working in open source or highly asynchronous engineering environments.

Technologies and domains

• Ruby on Rails
• Go
• AI-assisted development and the agentic SDLC
• PostgreSQL
• Redis and Sidekiq
• Git internals
• GitLab CI/CD and Runner architecture
• Kubernetes and containers
• Terraform
• Linux, networking, observability, and performance analysis
• Vue and TypeScript
• APIs and automation
• DevSecOps governance, security, and compliance

Success measures

• Stabilizing strategic customer adoption or retention risks.
• Fixing product bugs or contributing features.
• Removing AI adoption blockers for strategic accounts.
• Creating reusable implementation patterns and transitioning them to long-term owners.
• Producing or enabling Well-Architected Frameworks, whitepapers, webinars, or technical narratives.
• Resolving cross-functional customer challenges without creating permanent dependency on Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Equipping Product, Engineering, Support, CSA, CSM, Professional Services, and SA teams with better guidance based on learning from the field.
• Increasing adoption and effective use of GitLab capabilities, especially GitLab Duo and GitLab Duo Agent Platform, in targeted accounts.

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave