Distinguished Engineer, Core DevOps - GitLab

About GitLab

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

We embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact.

About the Role

We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer to lead technical direction across GitLab's Core DevOps services, the systems the majority of our users touch every day. Distinguished Engineers are recognized experts across multiple technology domains and represent the most senior level of technical leadership within and across divisions at the company.

Core DevOps builds continuous integration, continuous deployment, planning, and source control experiences. These are among the most mature, highest traffic, and most deeply interconnected systems at GitLab. The mission is to raise their quality, converge them onto a coherent go-forward architecture, and retire accumulated risk—all without interrupting the millions of users and Fortune 100 organizations who depend on them.

What You'll Do

• Set and continuously refine the go-forward technical direction for CI, CD, Plan, and source code experiences, aligned against horizontal architectural initiatives.
• Work directly with the VP of Engineering as a technical counterpart on planning, technical investment, and engineering resource allocation.
• Translate company-wide productivity, quality, and AI-native engineering goals into concrete technical direction for Core DevOps, and deliver iterable roadmaps.
• Define measurable standards for services (availability, latency at p95/p99, pipeline success rate, test reliability, data correctness, defect escape rate) and hold designs to them.
• Maintain a clear picture of systemic technical risk across the group, driving a prioritized plan to retire single points of failure, brittle coupling, and scaling bottlenecks.
• Lead complex architectural design decisions hands-on by writing code, prototypes, and proofs of concept.
• Drive convergence on shared patterns, libraries, and paved paths across the organization.
• Design migration paths that allow large, long-lived systems to evolve incrementally without downtime or disruption.
• Adopt platform capabilities from GitLab's AI organization into Core DevOps, feeding requirements back to prove capabilities at scale.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for complex or contested architectural decisions.
• Review critical design documents and merge requests to teach and elevate engineering rigor.
• Ensure architectural compatibility across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Security, and SRE to ensure Core DevOps services are observable, debuggable, and resilient.
• Mentor and grow Principal and Staff Engineers across Core DevOps, elevating technical writing and design rigor.
• Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation to help meet availability goals for GitLab.com.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Deep expertise in AI and ML systems, including large language models, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflow design at production scale.
• Proven track record of hands-on technical experimentation, including evaluation frameworks, benchmarking, and architectural execution.
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability, and operational resilience.
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production environments.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving technical direction across multiple teams or divisions without direct authority.
• Ability to excel in a fully remote, globally distributed organization with strong asynchronous written communication skills.