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GitLab is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the founding engineer for a new functional team owning glab, GitLab's Go-based command-line interface (CLI) and a key component of the Developer Clients strategy. In this individual contributor role, you will guide the technical direction end-to-end, owning architecture, implementation, roadmap execution, and day-to-day technical choices while working with minimal guidance.
You will design and ship terminal-first features and workflows in Go with careful attention to developer experience, performance, scripting-friendly output, and backwards compatibility. The role involves absorbing multiple changing inputs from Product, the open source community, and internal teams, then re-prioritizing as needs evolve while maintaining iterative shipping velocity.
Key responsibilities include partnering with Product Management to shape and execute the roadmap by framing problems, making clear trade-offs, and turning feedback into focused, high-impact changes. You will steer the open source project and community by triaging issues, reviewing and merging contributions, upholding quality standards, and respectfully declining requests while keeping contributors engaged.
You'll collaborate with other Developer Clients teams, including GitLab Duo CLI and IDE extensions, to ensure glab integrates seamlessly with the broader GitLab developer experience. You may also contribute to TypeScript or JavaScript-based developer tools when features or common components span multiple teams.
You should establish engineering practices for the new functional team and track glab adoption, release quality, and open source community health metrics to guide roadmap and engineering decisions.
Required experience includes significant professional work with Go and building command-line interfaces or systems-level tools, with thoughtful command and flag design, clear terminal experiences, scripting-friendly output, backwards compatibility, and cross-platform distribution (Linux, macOS, Windows). You need a sustained history of open source contributions through issues, merge requests, and reviews, ideally including project triage or maintainership. You must operate as a self-directed owner who absorbs multiple changing inputs, re-prioritizes with discretion, and continues delivering. Strong product and UX instincts for developer workflows are essential, including the ability to frame problems, simplify scope, make clear trade-offs, and say no when it improves overall experience. You should have experience setting technical direction and influencing work across teams in an IC role, and collaborating transparently in remote, asynchronous environments.
Preferred qualifications include experience with TypeScript or JavaScript developer tools, AI-powered developer tools or agents, plugin or extensibility architectures, and a background in developer tooling such as CLIs, SDKs, internal platforms, CI/CD, or IDE integrations. Familiarity with AI coding assistants (GitLab Duo, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or comparable tools) as part of a modern developer toolkit is valued.
