Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity - GitLab

About the Role

As a Staff Engineer, you will serve as the technical anchor for GitLab's Nonlinear Productivity (NLP) team in the US. This is a greenfield, generalist team operating without a dedicated product manager, requiring high levels of ownership from day one. You will define technical direction, solve complex SDLC friction points, and build agentic systems that transform how software is developed.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Set the direction for agentic systems, including orchestration, tool use, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.
• Problem Solving: Identify and prioritize friction across the SDLC, driving solutions from hypothesis to shipped, measured results.
• Full-Stack Engineering: Work across any part of the GitLab codebase to solve complex problems.
• Distributed Systems: Apply rigorous judgment to concurrency, scale, and deployment topologies (self-managed, dedicated, multi-tenant).
• Mentorship: Raise the collective bar through design reviews, pairing, and technical leadership for Staff-level hiring.
• Collaboration: Partner with the India-based NLP team to align on roadmaps and report progress to CTO-level stakeholders.

What You Bring

• Experience building reliable agentic or LLM-based systems (orchestration, tool use, guardrails).
• Strong proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, with the ability to read and modify code in the others.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (coordination, consistency, idempotency, failure modes).
• Ability to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases and decompose complex, ambiguous problems into shippable steps.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks to distinguish between "plausible" and "correct" system outputs.

About the Team

Nonlinear Productivity (NLP) is a strategic incubation group reporting into AI Platform leadership. We operate as a small, high-impact team building the future of GitLab's AI-driven offerings. We value technical ownership, continuous knowledge exchange, and a high-performance culture.

Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Comprehensive health, financial, and well-being benefits
• Parental Leave
• Team Member Resource Groups