Forward Deployed Engineer, AI and Agentic SDLC

ABOUT THE ROLE GitLab is a global leader in DevSecOps, empowering more than 50 million developers to ship secure, high‑quality software faster. The Forward Deployed Engineering team bridges the gap between what strategic customers need and what GitLab can deliver, turning complex customer challenges into reusable platform improvements. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer focused on AI and Agentic SDLC, you will shape the next generation of GitLab’s Duo Agent Platform, designing intelligent workflows that integrate seamlessly with the CLI, IDE, web, and AI Gateway. Your work will directly influence how developers across the world build, test, and ship code, while ensuring that AI systems are safe, reliable, and cost‑effective. WHAT YOU'LL DO You will design and build agentic systems that orchestrate models, context, retrieval, and tool use to automate software development tasks. You will develop advanced knowledge systems using retrieval‑augmented generation, graph‑based retrieval, and cache‑augmented generation to provide developers with contextual insights. You will engage with strategic customers in their environments, translating ambiguous needs into concrete, production‑ready solutions. You will create agent workflows, integrations, evaluation suites, and reference architectures that improve customer outcomes and drive adoption of AI features. You will contribute production‑quality code across the Duo Agent Platform and the broader GitLab product, ensuring high reliability, low latency, and optimal cost. You will evaluate system performance, safety, governance, and developer experience, diagnosing failures across models, context, and tool use. You will partner with Product and Engineering teams as an extension of their squads, accelerating delivery while aligning with product vision and engineering standards. You will distill customer‑specific learnings into reusable platform capabilities, implementation patterns, and technical guidance. You will provide staff‑level technical leadership through architecture, implementation, code review, mentorship, and cross‑team influence. WHAT YOU'LL NEED You bring staff‑level experience building, shipping, and improving complex production systems. You have hands‑on experience designing and building substantive AI systems, with a deep understanding of agentic architecture, context, retrieval, and human oversight. You possess a strong grasp of why AI systems can become unreliable, costly, or fail to gain adoption, and you know how to mitigate these risks. You have depth in at least one AI engineering domain such as agent systems, knowledge retrieval, AI developer tools, inference, or AI‑enabled product engineering. You are proficient in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, C#, or another language used to build AI, backend, developer‑tooling, or platform systems. You can navigate and contribute to large, mature, polyglot codebases. You understand AI safety, authorization, governance, observability, and cost management. You communicate clearly with customers and senior stakeholders, working through ambiguity and building trust while remaining deeply technical. You have a proven record of staff‑level impact through technical direction, reusable systems, mentorship, cross‑team influence, or product architecture. WHY REMOTE GitLab’s distributed culture is built on asynchronous collaboration, allowing teams to work across time zones without sacrificing cohesion. Remote work gives you the flexibility to design your schedule around personal productivity rhythms while still contributing to global projects. The company invests in tools and processes that support high‑quality communication, knowledge sharing, and rapid feedback, ensuring that remote engineers feel as connected and empowered as those in a physical office. BENEFITS GitLab offers comprehensive health coverage, including medical, dental, and vision plans. You receive generous paid time off, a remote stipend to support home office setup, and a learning budget for courses, conferences, and certifications. Additional benefits include equity participation, retirement savings matching, and a culture that values continuous learning and well‑being.