Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity

Role Description

As a Staff Engineer, you'll be the technical anchor for GitLab's Nonlinear Productivity team in the US:

• Decide what "proven" means before something ships.
• Help shape what the team builds next, not just how to build it.
• Work on a from-scratch, generalist team with no dedicated product manager.

Some examples of the problems this team takes on:

• Cutting the time it takes to complete a good code review by half, using agentic solutions.
• Turning a manual, error-prone release step into an agentic workflow that catches its own mistakes.

What you'll do:

• Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems.
• Discover and prioritize sources of friction across GitLab's SDLC.
• Work across any part of GitLab's codebase as needed.
• Apply distributed systems judgment to catch issues with generated code.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on agent engineering practices.
• Collaborate with the India-based group to align on the roadmap.
• Serve as a bar raiser for the team's hiring.
• Own a greenfield technical foundation from day one.

Qualifications

• Experience building reliable agentic or large language model (LLM)-based systems.
• Ability to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases.
• Strong distributed systems and computer science fundamentals.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python.
• A track record of delivering results from unclear or incomplete requirements.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for systems.
• A history of unblocking and enabling teammates.

Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave