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Salary: USD 250,000 - 349,000 / annual
GitLab is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to pioneer and scale autonomous, agentic SDLC capabilities across the company. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on identifying, validating, and productizing AI-agent-driven solutions that deliver 10x productivity improvements across the software development lifecycle.
You will work at the intersection of Architecture, Product, Infrastructure, and Data & ML teams to define a company-wide technical vision for agentic workflows. Your responsibilities include:
- Defining and refining GitLab's technical strategy for autonomous SDLC, identifying non-linear productivity opportunities from planning through operations
- Translating ambiguous problem spaces into concrete, iterable roadmaps in partnership with Product and Architecture teams
- Leading hands-on experiments and prototypes to validate agentic workflows for autonomous MR authoring, test creation, security remediation, release readiness, and incident response
- Designing reference architectures for agentic SDLC, including orchestration patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and human-in-the-loop controls
- Defining evaluation frameworks using offline benchmarks and online experiments to measure correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity impact
- Selecting and owning high-impact internal use cases as pathfinders, driving them from concept through adoption to measurable gains
- Embedding agentic workflows into day-to-day development, ensuring they are trusted, observable, and resilient
- Defining and tracking core productivity metrics (cycle time, MTTR, MR throughput) and linking agentic interventions to business outcomes
- Capturing and codifying reusable patterns, libraries, and playbooks for team adoption
- Converting proven internal patterns into product capabilities for customers, respecting multi-tenant and compliance requirements
- Serving as a point of escalation for complex technical and architectural decisions related to agentic workflows and AI safety
- Mentoring Principal and Staff Engineers on AI and agentic efforts, raising the bar for technical execution and cross-team collaboration
- Writing design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records to enable aligned, high-quality decisions
- Representing GitLab at conferences, standards groups, and open source communities on AI-assisted development and autonomous agents
- Partnering with Security and Compliance to define guardrails and monitoring for agentic features
- Working with Reliability and SRE teams to ensure agentic services are observable, debuggable, and resilient
Requirements:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership role
- Deep expertise in AI and ML systems, including large language models, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflow design at production scale
- Proven track record of leading hands-on technical experimentation, including defining evaluation frameworks, running benchmarks, and translating findings into scalable architecture decisions
- Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, including service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability, and operational resilience
- Experience designing and implementing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production systems
- Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Data & ML teams on complex, ambiguous technical challenges
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or divisions without direct authority
- Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization with excellent written and asynchronous communication skills
- Familiarity with GitLab's DevSecOps platform, CI/CD primitives, and the software development lifecycle is a strong plus
