Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

GitLab

1d•Remote

About The Position

GitLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering team is a field-situated product engineering function focused on strategic customer outcomes, artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, and direct contributions to GitLab’s product. This isn't a traditional field engineering, solutions architecture, or professional services role. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work closely with customers while maintaining the technical standards and contribution discipline of a Staff-level product engineer. You'll work where strategic customer urgency, complex technical ambiguity, and GitLab product execution intersect. You'll partner directly with strategic customers and teams across Product, Engineering, Support, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Solutions Architecture (SA), Customer Success Architecture (CSA), Customer Success Management (CSM), and Professional Services. You'll diagnose and resolve high-impact adoption blockers, contribute production-quality fixes and features, and turn what you learn into repeatable patterns for GitLab and its customers.

Requirements

Staff-level experience building, operating, or improving complex production software systems.
Experience contributing to large, mature product codebases with high standards for testing, maintainability, performance, and security.
Strong Ruby on Rails or Go experience and the ability to contribute directly to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.
Experience with AI-assisted software development, agentic workflows, AI governance, model evaluation, context management, prompt and workflow design, or AI adoption in enterprise environments.
Experience diagnosing complex system behavior across application code, data stores, infrastructure, observability, networking, APIs, and customer usage patterns.
Deep knowledge of modern DevSecOps workflows, including Git, merge requests, CI/CD, security controls, compliance needs, and enterprise software delivery.
Experience working with strategic customers or senior technical stakeholders in ambiguous, high-impact situations.
The ability to coordinate across product, engineering, field, and customer teams without formal authority.
Strong written communication and sound judgment, including the ability to create technical narratives and distinguish reusable product work from customer-specific customization.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with GitLab as a platform, including GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, or GitLab Self-Managed.
Production experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Vue, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, or observability tools.
Deep familiarity with Git internals, repository performance, large-scale Git usage patterns, or GitLab Runner behavior.
Experience creating technical thought-leadership materials, such as whitepapers, technical talks, architecture frameworks, requests for comments, public technical writing, or internal strategy documents.
A background in performance engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems.
Experience working in open source or highly asynchronous engineering environments.

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 governed, measurable, and production-oriented adoption of GitLab Duo Agent Platform with strategic customers.
Identify and resolve AI adoption blockers involving governance, usage controls, auditability, security, compliance, operating models, workflow design, and integrations.
Develop customer-safe adoption patterns for the agentic software development lifecycle (SDLC), AI-assisted development, intent-based review, AI governance, and human-in-the-loop software delivery.
Partner with Product, Engineering, Field, and Customer Success teams to turn AI adoption learning into reusable guidance and product improvements.
Create technical narratives grounded in customer experience and product reality that can help shape the industry’s approach.
Contribute to Well-Architected Frameworks, whitepapers, webinars, reference architectures, technical strategy memos, and adoption frameworks.
Guide ideas through discovery, formulation, validation, amplification, and adoption across GitLab.
Partner with SA, CSA, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Product Marketing Management, CSM, Support, and executive stakeholders to make technical thought leadership a shared company capability.