Staff Forward Deployed Engineer - GitLab

About the Role

GitLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering team is a field-situated product engineering function focused on strategic customer outcomes, AI adoption, and direct contributions to the GitLab product. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work at the intersection of strategic customer urgency, technical ambiguity, and product execution.

What You’ll Do

Product Contribution

• Contribute production-quality code to GitLab and adjacent systems.
• Develop bug fixes, features, and performance improvements based on strategic customer needs.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to ensure customer-driven solutions align with long-term product direction.

Strategic Technical Stewardship

• Engage with strategic customers to resolve high-impact adoption blockers.
• Diagnose complex issues across product behavior, Git internals, CI/CD workflows, and infrastructure.
• Coordinate across cross-functional teams (SRE, Support, SA, CSM) to drive resolution from discovery to handoff.

AI Adoption & Agentic SDLC

• Drive governed, production-oriented adoption of the GitLab Duo Agent Platform.
• Develop customer-safe patterns for AI-assisted development and AI governance.

Thought Leadership

• Create technical narratives, whitepapers, and reference architectures.
• Guide technical strategy and contribute to Well-Architected Frameworks.

What You’ll Bring

• Staff-level experience building and operating complex production software.
• Proficiency in Ruby on Rails or Go.
• Deep knowledge of modern DevSecOps workflows (Git, CI/CD, security, compliance).
• Experience diagnosing complex system behavior across application code, data stores, and infrastructure.
• Ability to coordinate across teams without formal authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with GitLab (GitLab.com, Dedicated, or Self-Managed).
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Kubernetes, or observability tools.
• Background in performance engineering, SRE, or distributed systems.
• Experience in open source or highly asynchronous engineering environments.