Distinguished Engineer, Agentic SDLC & Non‑Linear Productivity

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a Distinguished Engineer to pioneer and scale autonomous, agentic SDLC capabilities across GitLab. As a recognized expert across multiple technology domains, you will represent the most senior level of technical leadership within and across divisions at the company. Your primary focus will be to identify classes of problems that can be wholly or largely addressed by AI agents, validate them through rigorous experimentation in production-adjacent environments, and codify patterns that can be productized for our millions of users. You will act as a bridge between Architecture, Product, Infrastructure, and Data and ML teams, ensuring that agentic capabilities deliver durable value internally first and then scale reliably and securely to our customers. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Distinguished Engineer, you will define and continuously refine a company-wide technical vision for autonomous, agentic SDLC that aligns with GitLab's product strategy and Engineering job architecture. You will identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities across the SDLC, from planning and coding to review, security, compliance, and operations, targeting 10x step changes rather than incremental gains. Your responsibilities will include: - Defining and continuously refining a company-wide technical vision for autonomous, agentic SDLC - Identifying and prioritizing non-linear productivity opportunities across the SDLC - Translating ambiguous problem spaces into concrete, iterable roadmaps in partnership with Product, AI and ML, and Architecture teams - Leading hands-on experiments and prototypes to validate where agentic workflows can fully own or materially reshape engineering tasks - Designing and implementing reference architectures for agentic SDLC inside GitLab - Defining evaluation frameworks using offline benchmarks and online experiments to measure correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity impact of agentic workflows - Selecting and owning a small set of high-impact internal use cases as pathfinders and driving them from concept through adoption to measurable productivity gains - Working directly with engineering teams to embed agentic workflows into day-to-day development - Defining and tracking core productivity metrics such as cycle time, MTTR, and MR throughput - Capturing and codifying reusable patterns, libraries, and playbooks that other teams can adopt with minimal friction - Working with Product Management and Engineering leadership to convert proven internal patterns into product capabilities that can be safely and reliably offered to customers - Ensuring designs respect multi-tenant, compliance, and data governance requirements across GitLab.com and self-managed customers - Serving as a point of escalation for complex technical and architectural decisions related to agentic workflows, AI safety, and large-scale systems integration - Mentoring Principal and Staff Engineers working on AI and agentic efforts - Writing clear, opinionated design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records - Representing GitLab in the broader ecosystem at conferences, standards groups, and open source communities - Partnering with Security and Compliance to define guardrails, review processes, and monitoring for agentic features - Working with Reliability and SRE teams to ensure that agentic services are observable, debuggable, and resilient WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - 10+ years of software engineering experience, including