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GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to serve as the technical anchor for the Nonlinear Productivity team, a strategic incubation group under the CTO's direct sponsorship. This is a from-scratch, generalist team without a dedicated product manager, meaning technical ownership and product direction decisions start on day one.
In this role, you will set the technical direction for agentic systems, determining how agents are orchestrated and where human oversight should remain. You'll discover and prioritize sources of friction across GitLab's software development lifecycle, driving solutions—whether agentic, process-based, or hybrid—from hypothesis through shipped, measured results.
Key responsibilities include working across GitLab's codebase as problems require, applying distributed systems expertise to catch edge cases in generated code (concurrency, scale, deployment topologies including self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant), and mentoring senior and mid-level engineers on agent engineering practices. You'll collaborate with the India-based group several times weekly to align on roadmap and represent technical progress to the CTO's organization. You'll also serve as a bar raiser for hiring, owning the Technical Leadership round for other Staff-level candidates.
You should bring experience building reliable agentic or LLM-based systems with multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery mechanisms. Strong distributed systems fundamentals are essential—coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load. Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python (with ability to read/modify others) is required. You'll need a track record of delivering results from unclear requirements, designing evaluation frameworks to distinguish "plausible" from "correct," and unblocking teammates through design reviews, technical writing, or mentoring.
