Forward Deployed Engineer, AI and Agentic SDLC

Job Description

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. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: 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. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software. *Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab. Forward Deployed Engineer, AI and Agentic SDLC An Overview of This Role GitLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering team closes the gap between what strategic customers need and what GitLab can currently deliver. We work alongside customers, Product, Engineering, and existing field teams, using hands-on engineering to resolve product friction, accelerate customer outcomes, and contribute reusable improvements back to GitLab. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer focused on AI and Agentic SDLC, you will help define and build GitLab Duo Agent Platform at the frontier of agentic software development. You will design agent workflows and context systems, build integrations and product changes, evaluate and optimize system behavior, and work directly with customers to understand where AI systems succeed, fail, or create friction. Engagements may range from a focused technical consultation to a long-running design partnership. The technical work may span GitLab’s CLI, IDE integrations, AI Gateway, web experiences, agent orchestration, evaluation systems, authorization controls, and other evolving parts of the platform. What You’ll Do - Design and build agentic systems using models, tools, action loops, orchestration, context, retrieval, state, memory, evaluation, tracing, and human oversight. - Develop context and knowledge systems using approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation, cache-augmented generation, graph-based retrieval, repository understanding, and context optimization. - Work directly in strategic customer environments to understand technical friction and turn ambiguous needs into working solutions. - Build agent workflows, integrations, evaluation suites, reference architectures, and product capabilities that improve customer outcomes. - Contribute production-quality changes across GitLab Duo Agent Platform and the broader GitLab product. - Evaluate and improve system quality, reliability, latency, cost, token use, safety, authorization, governance, and developer experience. - Diagnose failures across models, context, retrieval, tool use, control flow, product behavior, permissions, and surrounding software-development workflows. - Partner with Product and Engineering as an extension of their teams, accelerating work while aligning with product direction and engineering standards. - Generalize customer-specific learning into reusable platform capabilities, implementation patterns, and technical guidance. - Provide Staff-level technical leadership through architecture, implementation, review, mentorship, and influence across teams. What You’ll Bring - Staff-level software-engineering experience building, shipping, and improving complex production systems. - Hands-on experience designing and building substantive AI systems, with the ability to evaluate, trace, debug, and optimize their behavior. - Strong understanding of how agentic systems use models, context, retrieval, tools, state, control flow, evaluation, and human oversight. - Understanding of why AI systems become unreliable, fail to achieve adoption, or consume significant resources without producing useful outcomes. - Depth in one or more areas of AI engineering, such as agent systems, context and knowledge systems, AI developer tools, inference, or AI-enabled product engineering. - Strong programming skills in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, C#, or another language used to build AI, backend, developer-tooling, or platform systems. - Ability to learn and contribute across large, mature, polyglot codebases. - Practical understanding of AI safety, authorization, go

Requirements

Staff-level software-engineering experience building, shipping, and improving complex production systems. Hands-on experience designing and building substantive AI systems, with the ability to evaluate, trace, debug, and optimize their behavior. Strong understanding of how agentic systems use models, context, retrieval, tools, state, control flow, evaluation, and human oversight. Understanding of why AI systems become unreliable, fail to achieve adoption, or consume significant resources without producing useful outcomes. Depth in one or more areas of AI engineering, such as agent systems, context and knowledge systems, AI developer tools, inference, or AI-enabled product engineering. Strong programming skills in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, C#, or another language used to build AI, backend, developer-tooling, or platform systems. Ability to learn and contribute across large, mature, polyglot codebases. Practical understanding of AI safety, authorization, go

Responsibilities

- Contribute production-quality code to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.

- Develop bug fixes, features, integrations, tooling, and performance improvements when strategic customer outcomes require direct engineering work.

- Work within GitLab’s product and engineering processes, including issue discovery, merge request creation, testing, review, documentation, and maintainability.

- Partner with Product and Engineering so customer-driven solutions support long-term product direction rather than becoming one-off customizations.

- Turn blockers discovered in the field into durable product improvements, reference architectures, documentation, and repeatable implementation patterns.

- Engage with strategically important customers when adoption, retention, executive confidence, or public trust is materially at risk.

- Diagnose complex problems across GitLab product behavior, customer architecture, Git internals, CI/CD workflows, API usage, observability, infrastructure, networking, and cloud environments.

- Coordinate across Product, Engineering, SRE, Support, SA, CSA, CSM, Professional Services, and customer technical teams to drive resolution from discovery through handoff.

- Provide recommendations grounded in data, traces, and systems analysis to improve GitLab usage, workflows, automation, and architecture.

- Create durable outcomes without establishing permanent dependency on Forward Deployed Engineering.

- Drive gover

Forward Deployed Engineer, AI and Agentic SDLC

Job Description

Requirements

Responsibilities

Skills Required

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