Forward Deployed Engineer - UK

ABOUT THE ROLE As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will work at the intersection of customer outcomes, product direction, and hands-on engineering to drive strategic customer adoption and growth in the APJ region. This role is focused on helping customers navigate complex enterprise environments, including self-managed, regulated, and constrained deployments, to achieve faster time to value and improved operational efficiency. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, your key responsibilities will include: - Conducting deep technical discovery in selected strategic accounts to assess platform readiness, evaluate constraints, and identify high-value adoption opportunities across GitLab and GitLab Duo Agent Platform. - Leading architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where platform migration, regulated requirements, and product boundaries intersect. - Partnering with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long-term platform value. - Designing and building bounded proofs, prototypes, deployment patterns, and reusable accelerators across source code management, CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows. - Architecting self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, observability, AI Gateway, model connectivity, and governance controls. - Turning recurring field patterns into reusable assets such as runbooks, templates, design notes, technical guidance, product briefs, and reference architectures that can be used across accounts. - Contributing code, technical designs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, in partnership with product and engineering, to address blockers that should be solved upstream. - Traveling as needed for strategic customer engagements, architecture workshops, and team coordination, with expected travel up to 50%. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you will need: - Experience in software engineering, platform architecture, forward deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-facing engineering roles. - Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to read, reason about, and contribute to production systems, ideally with experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go. - Strong systems design and software architecture skills, with experience evaluating APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability, and operational tradeoffs. - Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners, and GitLab APIs. - Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or similar approaches. - Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, tool orchestration, and the practical limits of AI systems in production environments. - A track record of creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, along with strong written and verbal communication skills for technical design and architecture guidance. WHY REMOTE As a remote team member at GitLab, you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere and be part of a high-performance culture that values collaboration, innovation, and continuous knowledge exchange. Our team is driven by our values and a commitment to solving complex problems and making a meaningful impact. BENEFITS As a member of the GitLab team, you will enjoy a competitive salary, comprehensive benefits package, and opportunities for growth and development in a