As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you work at the intersection of customer outcomes, product direction and hands-on engineering on strategic accounts, helping customers adopt GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform in complex enterprise environments, including self-managed, regulated and constrained deployments. Rather than one-off consulting delivery, you use customer issues to create durable technical assets, shape architecture patterns and influence upstream product and engineering decisions. Expected travel is up to 50%.
Responsibilities
- ▹Conduct deep technical discovery in strategic accounts to assess platform readiness, evaluate constraints and identify high-value adoption opportunities across GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform
- ▹Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where platform migration, regulated requirements and product boundaries intersect
- ▹Partner with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize use cases by business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability and long-term platform value
- ▹Design and build bounded proofs, prototypes, deployment patterns and reusable accelerators across SCM, CI/CD, security, compliance and AI-enabled workflows
- ▹Architect self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, observability, AI Gateway, model connectivity and governance controls
- ▹Turn recurring field patterns into reusable assets such as runbooks, templates, design notes, product briefs and reference architectures
- ▹Contribute code, technical designs or architecture changes when strategically necessary, in partnership with Product and Engineering, to address blockers solved upstream
- ▹Travel as needed for strategic customer engagements, architecture workshops and team coordination, with expected travel up to 50%
Requirements
- ▹Experience in software engineering, platform architecture, forward deployed engineering, technical consulting or similar customer-facing engineering roles
- ▹Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to read, reason about and contribute to production systems, ideally with Ruby on Rails and/or Go
- ▹Strong systems design and software architecture skills, evaluating APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability and operational tradeoffs
- ▹Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners and GitLab APIs
- ▹Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm or similar
- ▹Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, tool orchestration and the practical limits of AI systems in production
- ▹A track record of creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, with strong written and verbal communication
- ▹Comfort leading conversations with senior stakeholders across security, compliance, engineering, platform and business teams in ambiguous enterprise environments
Soft skills
What we offer
- ▹Flexible Paid Time Off
- ▹Team Member Resource Groups
- ▹Equity compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- ▹Growth and Development Fund
- ▹Parental leave
- ▹Fully remote work
About the company
GitLab is an intelligent DevSecOps orchestration platform that helps organizations increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, and reduce security and compliance risk. More than 50 million registered users and over half of the Fortune 100 use GitLab. The company is fully remote, works asynchronously across regions, and treats AI as a core productivity multiplier. The team works closely with Customer Success, Solutions Architecture, Product, Support and Engineering to solve hard adoption problems for strategic customers.