Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems, including agent orchestration, human-in-the-loop boundaries, and validation against real code.
• Discover and prioritize friction across the software development lifecycle, driving solutions from hypothesis through shipped, measured results.
• Work across GitLab's codebase as needed within a generalist team.
• Apply distributed-systems judgment to concurrency, scale, deployment topologies, and self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant environments.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and pairing on agent engineering and distributed-systems practices.
• Collaborate with the India-based group several times a week on roadmap alignment.
• Represent technical progress to stakeholders in the Chief Technology Officer's organization.
• Support hiring as a bar raiser and own the Technical Leadership round for Staff-level candidates.
• Establish the team's greenfield technical foundation and grow its scope and impact.

Requirements

• Experience building reliable agentic or large language model (LLM)-based systems, including multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery.
• Ability to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases and drive solutions from discovery through completion.
• Strong distributed-systems and computer-science fundamentals, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, with the ability to read and modify code in the others.
• Track record of delivering results from unclear or incomplete requirements and decomposing complex problems into concrete, shippable steps.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks that distinguish plausible output from correct output.
• History of enabling teammates through design reviews, technical writing, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration.

Benefits and Compensation

• Flexible paid time off.
• Team member resource groups.
• Equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan.
• Growth and development fund.
• Parental leave.
• Remote work arrangement with country-specific eligibility requirements.