Field Strategist, Forward Deployed Engineer

GitLab

19h•Remote

About The Position

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. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will work at the intersection of customer outcomes, product direction, and hands-on engineering. This role is focused on strategic accounts, where you will help customers adopt GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform in complex enterprise environments, including self-managed, regulated, and constrained deployments. You will guide deep technical discovery, design practical adoption paths, and build reusable solutions that help customers move from early platform use into broader CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows. This is not a traditional consulting role centered on one-off delivery. Instead, you will use customer issues to create durable technical assets, shape architecture patterns, and influence upstream product and engineering decisions when field needs point to a broader solution. Your work will help reduce time to value for strategic customers while improving how GitLab scales adoption across similar environments.

Requirements

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.
Comfort leading conversations with senior stakeholders across security, compliance, engineering, platform, and business teams, especially in ambiguous enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

Conduct 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.
Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where platform migration, regulated requirements, and product boundaries intersect.
Partner with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long-term platform value.
Design and build bounded proofs, prototypes, deployment patterns, and reusable accelerators across source code management, CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows.
Architect self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, observability, AI Gateway, model connectivity, and governance controls.
Turn 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.
Contribute code, technical designs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, in partnership with product and engineering, to address blockers that should be solved upstream.
Travel as needed for strategic customer engagements, architecture workshops, and team coordination, with expected travel up to 50%.