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Salary: USD 250,000 - 349,000 / annual
GitLab is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to lead technical direction across Core DevOps services—the systems that power continuous integration, continuous deployment, planning, and source control for millions of users and 50% of the Fortune 100.
Core DevOps manages some of GitLab's most mature, highest-traffic, and deeply interconnected systems. These services sit in the critical path of customers' delivery pipelines and are being reshaped by AI-native development. The role is to raise their quality, converge them onto coherent architecture, and retire accumulated risk without interrupting millions of dependent users.
You will set and refine the go-forward technical direction for CI, CD, Plan, and source code experiences, aligned with horizontal architectural initiatives. You'll work directly with the VP of Engineering as a technical counterpart on planning and investment priorities. Your responsibilities include translating company-wide productivity, quality, and AI-native engineering goals into concrete technical direction and iterable roadmaps; defining measurable quality standards (availability, latency at p95/p99, pipeline success rate, test reliability, data correctness, defect escape rate); maintaining a clear picture of systemic technical risk and driving prioritized retirement plans; leading hands-on design decisions with code, prototypes, and proofs of concept; driving convergence on shared patterns and libraries; designing migration paths for large systems to evolve without breaking users; adopting AI platform capabilities into Core DevOps; serving as escalation point for complex technical decisions; reviewing significant designs and merge requests in critical paths; ensuring designs work across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments; partnering with Infrastructure, Security, and SRE teams; making architectural constraints clear to Product; writing design documents and decision records; growing Principal and Staff Engineers; and participating in incident management on-call rotation.
You'll bring 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 is required, including large language models, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflow design at production scale. You'll have a proven track record of leading hands-on technical experimentation, defining evaluation frameworks, running benchmarks, and translating findings into scalable architecture decisions. Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems (service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability, operational resilience) is essential. Experience designing and implementing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production systems is required. You must have experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or divisions without direct authority. Excellent written and asynchronous communication skills are critical for working in a fully remote, globally distributed organization.
