Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering – Nonlinear Productivity at GitLab

About the role

Staff Backend Engineer building agentic systems that improve software development productivity at GitLab. Setting architecture, evaluating correctness, and scaling greenfield DevSecOps automation.

Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems, including agent orchestration and human-owned steps
Discover and prioritize friction across GitLab's software development lifecycle and drive fixes from hypothesis to shipped, measured results
Work across GitLab's codebase as required by the problem
Apply distributed systems judgment to generated code across concurrency, scale, and deployment topologies
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews and pairing
Collaborate with the India-based group several times a week on roadmap alignment
Represent technical progress to stakeholders in the CTO organization
Own the Technical Leadership hiring round for Staff-level candidates
Own the greenfield technical foundation as the team scales

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 ability to read and modify code in the others
Track record of delivering results from unclear or incomplete requirements
Experience designing evaluation frameworks distinguishing plausible output from correct output
Track record of raising the quality bar for a team's output
History of unblocking and enabling teammates through design reviews, technical writing, or mentoring
Regular engagement with other teams to identify effective collaboration opportunities