Distinguished Engineer, Agentic SDLC & Non‑Linear Productivity

GitLab is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to pioneer and scale autonomous, agentic SDLC capabilities across its platform.

As a Distinguished Engineer at GitLab, you will deeply immerse yourself in GitLab's product and internal engineering workflows to identify classes of problems that can be wholly or largely addressed by AI agents. You will validate them through rigorous experimentation in production-adjacent environments and codify patterns that can be productized for millions of users.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and continuously refine a company-wide technical vision for autonomous, agentic SDLC that aligns with GitLab's product strategy and Engineering job architecture.
• Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities across the SDLC, targeting 10x step changes.
• Translate ambiguous problem spaces into concrete, iterable roadmaps with Product, AI and ML, and Architecture teams.
• Lead hands-on experiments and prototypes to validate agentic workflows.
• Design and implement reference architectures for agentic SDLC inside GitLab.
• Define evaluation frameworks to measure correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity impact of agentic workflows.
• Select and own high-impact internal use cases and drive them from concept to adoption.
• Work directly with engineering teams to embed agentic workflows into day-to-day development.
• Define and track core productivity metrics and link agentic interventions to real business outcomes.
• Capture and codify reusable patterns, libraries, and playbooks.
• Work with Product Management and Engineering leadership to convert proven internal patterns into product capabilities.
• Ensure designs respect multi-tenant, compliance, and data governance requirements.
• Serve as a point of escalation for complex technical and architectural decisions.
• Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers working on AI and agentic efforts.
• Write clear design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records.
• Represent GitLab in the broader ecosystem at conferences and standards groups.
• Partner with Security and Compliance to define guardrails and monitoring for agentic features.
• Work with Reliability and SRE teams to ensure agentic services are observable and resilient.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Deep expertise in AI and ML systems, including large language models and autonomous workflow design.
• Proven track record of leading technical experimentation and defining evaluation frameworks.
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems.
• Experience designing and implementing human-in-the-loop controls and safety guardrails.
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Data and ML teams.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction.
• Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization.
• Familiarity with GitLab's DevSecOps platform is a strong plus.

Benefits:

• Benefits to support 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