Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

GitLab is seeking a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to join their team. This role involves working directly with strategic customers, Product, Engineering, Support, and other teams to diagnose and resolve high-impact adoption blockers, contribute production-grade fixes and features, and convert learning into repeatable patterns for GitLab and its customers.

Core Responsibilities:

• Contribute production-quality code to GitLab's product and adjacent systems.
• Develop bug fixes, features, integrations, tooling, or performance improvements where strategic customer outcomes require direct engineering contribution.
• Work within GitLab's normal product and engineering processes, including issue discovery, MR creation, testing, review, documentation, and maintainability.
• Influence Product and Engineering to ensure customer-driven solutions align with long-term product direction and do not become one-off customizations.
• Translate field-discovered blockers into durable product improvements, reference architectures, documentation, or 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 technical 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, PS, and customer technical teams to drive end-to-end resolution.
• Provide data-driven, trace-level, systems-level recommendations for improving GitLab usage, workflows, automation, and architecture.
• Ensure FDE involvement creates durable outcomes rather than permanent dependency.

AI Adoption and Agentic SDLC:

• Drive adoption of GitLab Duo Agent Platform with strategic customers in governed, measurable, production-oriented ways.
• Identify and resolve blockers to AI adoption, including governance, usage controls, auditability, security, compliance, operating model, workflow design, and integration gaps.
• Develop customer-safe adoption patterns for agentic SDLC, AI-assisted development, intent-based review, AI governance, and human-in-the-loop software delivery.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Field, and Customer Success to translate AI adoption learning into reusable guidance and product improvements.

Thought Leadership:

• Lead GitLab in creating industry-shaping technical narratives grounded in real customer experience and product reality.
• Contribute to Well Architected Frameworks, whitepapers, webinars, reference architectures, technical strategy memos, and adoption frameworks.
• Steward ideas from discovery through formulation, validation, amplification, and normalization across the company.
• Partner with SA, CSA, Product, Engineering, Marketing, PMM, CSM, Support, and executive stakeholders to make thought leadership a company capability rather than an isolated team activity.

Requirements:

• Staff-level experience building, operating, or improving complex production software systems.
• Demonstrated ability to contribute to large, mature product codebases with high standards for testing, maintainability, performance, and security.
• Strong Ruby/Rails or Go experience, with ability to contribute directly to GitLab's product contribution surface.
• Experience diagnosing complex system behavior across application code, data stores, infrastructure, observability, networking, APIs, and customer usage patterns.
• Deep understanding 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.
• Ability to coordinate across Product, Engineering, Support, SRE, SA, CSA, CSM, Professional Services, and customer teams without formal authority.
• Strong written communication skills, including the ability to produce technical narratives, architecture guidance, and reusable field/product assets.
• Demonstrated judgment in distinguishing reusable product/platform work from customer-specific customization.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Direct experience with GitLab as a platform, including GitLab.com, Dedicated, or self-managed deployments.
• Production experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Vue, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, and observability tooling.
• Deep familiarity with Git internals, repository performance, large-scale Git usage patterns, or CI runner behavior.
• Experience with AI-assisted software development, agentic workflows, AI governance, model evaluation, context management, prompt/workflow design, or AI adoption in regulated enterprise environments.
• Experience creating thought-leadership artifacts such as whitepapers, technical talks, architecture frameworks, RFCs, public technical writing, or internal strategy documents.
• Background in performance engineering, SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems.
• Experience working in open-source or highly asynchronous engineering environments.

Technologies and Domains: Directly relevant technologies include:

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

Success Measures:

• Strategic customer adoption or retention risks stabilized.
• Product bugs fixed or features contributed.
• AI adoption blockers removed for strategic accounts.
• Reusable implementation patterns created and handed off.
• Well Architected Frameworks, whitepapers, webinars, or technical narratives produced or enabled.
• Cross-functional customer challenges resolved without creating permanent FDE dependency.
• Product, Engineering, Support, CSA, CSM, PS, and SA teams equipped with better guidance from field-discovered learning.
• Increased adoption and effective usage of GitLab capabilities, especially GitLab Duo and Duo Agent Platform, in targeted accounts.

Ideal Candidate Profile: The ideal candidate is a Staff-level product or platform engineer who can operate in the field without becoming 'field only.' They are equally comfortable reading traces, writing production code, debugging architecture, discussing AI governance, leading a customer technical session, opening a merge request, writing a whitepaper outline, and coordinating across internal teams to achieve a strategic customer outcome. They are not simply a strong communicator with technical awareness. They are a deeply credible engineer with the judgment, presence, and narrative ability required to turn customer reality into product contribution, adoption guidance, and company-level thought leadership.

Salary Range: $254,000-$297,000 USD