SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer for its Nonlinear Productivity team, a strategic incubation group under the CTO's direct sponsorship. This role focuses on identifying and eliminating friction across the software development lifecycle using AI-powered automation and agentic solutions.
You will design and build reliable AI-powered systems that execute step-by-step workflows, integrate tool use with safety checks, and self-correct before taking engineering action. Key responsibilities include scoping agentic solutions to address concrete pain points (e.g., accelerating code reviews, automating error-prone release steps), building evaluation tools to assess agent output on correctness and cost, and applying distributed systems expertise to catch failures before they reach customers.
The role requires hands-on experience building production-grade agentic or LLM-based systems—not one-off demonstrations. You'll work autonomously across GitLab's codebase, collaborating with a distributed team (US-based group plus India-based counterpart) to develop internal solutions that may eventually become customer-facing offerings. Strong distributed systems knowledge is essential, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, and failure modes under load.
Required skills: proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python (in that priority order), with ability to read and modify code in other languages. Helpful experience includes shipping autonomous agents for real tasks, improving build/release/review workflows, and working with globally distributed teams managing LLM workload costs and multi-deployment constraints (on-premises, air-gapped, single-tenant, SaaS).
The team operates like a startup with no dedicated product manager or pre-set backlog. You'll have ownership of greenfield problem spaces from day one, with scope and impact growing as the team scales.
