Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Product Contribution

• 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.

Required Qualifications

• 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.

Strongly 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.