Description
As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will work at the intersection of customer outcomes, product direction, and hands-on engineering. This role is focused on strategic accounts in the APJ region, where you will help customers adopt GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform in complex enterprise environments, including self-managed, regulated, and constrained deployments.
You will guide deep technical discovery, design practical adoption paths, and build reusable solutions that help customers move from early platform use into broader CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows. This is not a traditional consulting role centered on one-off delivery. Instead, you will use customer issues to create durable technical assets, shape architecture patterns, and influence upstream product and engineering decisions when field needs point to a broader solution.
Your work will help reduce time to value for strategic customers while improving how GitLab scales adoption across similar environments.
Some examples of our projects:
- Building a regulated-environment deployment accelerator for GitLab Duo Agent Platform in self-managed or constrained environments
- Authoring reusable reference architectures for AI Gateway, identity, runners, network boundaries, model connectivity, and governance controls
- Identifying a geo-replication gap in a self-managed deployment, tracing it to a root cause in Gitaly or the git backend, and contributing a targeted code or design change upstream
Responsibilities:
- Conduct deep technical discovery in selected strategic accounts to assess platform readiness, evaluate constraints, and identify high-value adoption opportunities across GitLab and GitLab Duo Agent Platform.
- Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where platform migration, regulated requirements, and product boundaries intersect.
- Partner with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long-term platform value.
- Design and build bounded proofs, prototypes, deployment patterns, and reusable accelerators across source code management, CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows.
- Architect self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, observability, AI Gateway, model connectivity, and governance controls.
- Turn recurring field patterns into reusable assets such as runbooks, templates, design notes, technical guidance, product briefs, and reference architectures that can be used across accounts.
- Contribute code, technical designs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, in partnership with product and engineering, to address blockers that should be solved upstream.
- Travel as needed for strategic customer engagements, architecture workshops, and team coordination, with expected travel up to 50%.
Requirements:
- Experience in software engineering, platform architecture, forward deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-facing engineering roles.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to read, reason about, and contribute to production systems, ideally with experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go.
- Strong systems design and software architecture skills, with experience evaluating APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners, and GitLab APIs.
- Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or similar approaches.
- Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, tool orchestration, and the practical limits of AI systems in production environments.
- A track record of creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, along with strong written and verbal communication skills for technical design and architecture guidance.
- Comfort leading conversations with senior stakeholders across security, compliance, engineering, platform, and business teams, especially in ambiguous enterprise environments.
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
- Home Office Support