An overview of this roleAs a Staff Engineer, you'll be the technical anchor for GitLab's Nonlinear Productivity team in the US: the person who decides what "proven" means before something ships, and who helps shape what the team builds next, not just how to build it. It's a from-scratch, generalist team with no dedicated product manager - that ownership starts on day one.
Some examples of the problems this team takes on:
- Cutting the time it takes to complete a good code review - one that still keeps a human in the loop - by half, using agentic solutions.
- Turning a manual, error-prone release step into an agentic workflow that catches its own mistakes before a human ever has to.
What you'll do- Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems, from how agents are orchestrated to where a step should stay human-owned, and defend those calls once they're tested against real code.
- Discover and prioritize sources of friction across GitLab's SDLC, driving the fix - agentic, process-based, or both - from a rough hypothesis through to a shipped, measured result.
- Work across any part of GitLab's codebase as the problem requires, since this team operates like a small, generalist group rather than one scoped to a single service.
- Apply distributed systems judgment to catch cases where generated code looks correct but breaks under concurrency, at scale, or across deployment topologies (including self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant environments), and coach others to do the same.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on agent engineering practices and distributed systems judgment, through design reviews and pairing that raise the team's collective bar rather than just your own output.
- Collaborate with the India-based group a few times a week to align on the roadmap, and represent the team's technical progress to stakeholders in the Chief Technology Officer's organization.
- Serve as a bar raiser for the team's hiring, owning the Technical Leadership round for other Staff-level candidates as the team scales.
- Own a greenfield technical foundation from day one, with your scope and impact free to grow as the team scales.
What you'll bring- Experience building reliable agentic or large language model (LLM)-based systems, including multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery.
- Ability to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases and drive solutions from discovery through completion.
- Strong distributed systems and computer science fundamentals, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load.
- Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, with the ability to read and modify code in the others.
- A track record of delivering results from unclear or incomplete requirements - able to take a complex, loosely specified problem and decompose it into a concrete proposal of small, shippable steps.
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks for systems where "looks plausible" and "is actually correct" are different questions, and a track record of raising the quality bar for a team's output, not just your own.
- A history of unblocking and enabling teammates - through design reviews, technical writing, or mentoring - and of engaging regularly with other teams to find where collaboration actually pays off.
About the teamNonlinear Productivity - shortened internally to "NLP," with no relation to natural language processing - is one of GitLab's newest teams: a strategic incubation group that reports into AI Platform leadership under the direct sponsorship of the CTO. It's split into a US group (this role) and an India-based group working the same charter; the two sync on roadmap and tooling a few times a week but otherwise run day to day on their own. Solutions that prove out internally are the team's path to a monetized, customer-facing GitLab offering.
It's a good fit for engineers who want technical ownership of something with no existing playbook, and a hand in defining a brand-new part of GitLab from its first commit.
Remote-Global
How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees- Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.
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