Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, EMEA

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.

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 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.

Responsibilities

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave