Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Skills this role screens for

About the role

Gitlab is hiring for the role of Staff Forward Deployed Engineer!

The work

Responsibilities of the Candidate

• 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.
• 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.

Who they want

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.